Jan Musil was born on 2 July 1941 in Pilsen. He is married with one grown-up daughter.
Mr Musil graduated from the Law Faculty of Charles University (Prague) in 1963. For four years, he served as a prosecutor trainee and a district prosecutor in the Prosecutor’s Office in Šumperk, focusing on juvenile crime.
He returned to teach at his alma mater in 1967 where he was appointed senior lecturer in 1985. In 1993 he received professorship and became the Chair of the Criminal Law Department. He was the University’s Rector in 1992-1998 and then a Vice-Rector of the National Police Academy in Prague until 2003. He was a visiting professor at the University of Western Bohemia in Pilsen.
Jan Musil studied and lectured at a number of universities, such as Cracow, Warsaw, Berlin, Moscow, Saarbrücken and Linz. He is a regular guest of the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in Freiburg im Breisgau (Germany) and is frequently invited to international conferences. He sits, inter alia, on the Research Boards of the Law Faculty of Charles University (Prague), Law Faculty of Masaryk University (Brno), National Police Academy (Prague), Institute for International Relations of the Czech Ministry for Foreign Affairs and on the Advisory Board of the Institute for Criminology and Social Prevention in Prague.
Professor Musil specializes in criminal law and criminological practice. He is the author of several university textbooks and monographs; he has published more than one hundred studies and articles in law journals in his homeland, Germany and Poland. He chairs the editorial board of the Kriminalistika (Criminological Practice) review and is an editorial board member of the following journals: Kriminalistika, Trestní právo (Criminal Law), and the Cracow-based Z Zagadnieñ Nauk Sšdowych (Problems of Forensic Sciences). He is a member of the Criminology Society and of the National Group of the International Criminal Law Society. He is an honorary member of the White Circle of Safety, a civic association that helps victims of crime.
Professor Musil was appointed Judge of the Czech Constitutional Court on 27 November 2003.