Born 12 June 1946, married with two adult children. He completed his studies at the Faculty of Law at Charles University in Prague in 1969. After working for two years as a judicial expectant he worked from 1971 as a judge at the civil law section of the District Court in Usti nad Labem, until resigning on 31 July 1978 and joining the then District National Health Institution in Jihlava. During his work here as a company lawyer he concentrated largely on administrative, labour, civil and medical law, as he also did at the District Hygiene Station in Jihlava where he worked from 1987 to 1990.
       He was awarded his doctorate of law at the Faculty of Law at Charles University in Prague in 1981. From 1982 to 1984 he attended four-semester post-graduate studies at the same faculty in the study field administrative law and the state administration. In 1989 he was awarded a post-graduate diploma in medical law. He passed his state language examination in French in 1968 and in English in 1972.
       In January 1991 he returned to the judiciary as judge at the civil law section of the District Court in Jihlava, where he also held the post of deputy presiding judge. With effect from 1 January 1995 he became judge and, from 1998, chairman of the senate of the board of civil law at the Supreme Court of the Czech Republic in Brno. On 6 June 2002 he was appointed judge at the Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic by Czech President Vaclav Havel.
       During the 1990s he made a number of specialist study trips to Canada, Holland, France and Spain, where first and foremost he studied communal law, the system of protection of basic human rights and the position of judicial power in the constitutional systems of various countries. In 1997 and 1998, at the Council of Europe, he contributed to the drawing up of the Charter on the Statute of European Justice. In recent years he has played an active part at a number of international legal conferences. His published works have been largely on the position of judicial power in the Czech Republic and in the constitutional systems of EU countries.