Dr. Špelca Mežnar graduated from the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana in 1999. In 2000 she completed a postgraduate specialisation in European Community law, and in 2002 she completed a Master’s degree in civil and commercial law.
In the following year she passed the Judicial Exam and in 2004 she obtained her doctorate with the dissertation “Copyright in the Conflict of Laws Rules of Private International Law” under the supervision of dr. Miha Trampuž. In 2005, she received the “Young Lawyer of the Year” award from the Association of Law Societies of Slovenia.
From 1999 to 2008 she worked as a young researcher, assistant and assistant professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Ljubljana, where she worked on courses in private international law, commercial law, intellectual property law and contract law. She has regularly studied abroad, for which she has received scholarships: in 2001 in the USA (Franklin Pierce Law Center: copyright) and in the Netherlands (The Netherlands School of Human Rights and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven: human rights); in 2002 in Finland (Åbo Akademi, Turku: International Law) and the Netherlands (Hague Academy of International Law: Private International Law); in 2003 in Germany (Deutsche Institution für Schiedsgerichtsbarkeit – DIS, Cologne: International Commercial Arbitration) and the Netherlands (University of Columbia and Universiteit van Amsterdam: American Law). In 2006 she participated as Marie Curie Fellow in the project “Unfair Suretyship in European Contract Law” (Bremen, Germany).In 2012-2015 she led a team of researchers from Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia in the FP7 project “Tenancy Law and Housing Policy in Multi-Level Europe”. She is the author of several expert legal studies (Analysis of key decisions of Slovenian courts in relation to the enforcement of intellectual property rights, Pilot Field Study on the Functioning of the National Judicial Systems for Application of Competition Law Rules, Study on Conveyancing Services Regulations in Europe).
Since 2007, she has worked in the legal profession, first at Čeferin Law Firm (Commercial Department) and since 2015 at Vrtačnik Law Firm. She specialises in contract, tort, copyright, consumer protection and public procurement law. She is an arbitrator at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Slovenia.
She has been working as a higher education teacher and researcher at the International School for Social and Business Studies Celje since 2008 and at the VŠR College of Accounting and Finance since 2024. She is the author of numerous articles (her bibliography includes more than 100 items in the COBISS system) and a regular lecturer at training courses for judges, lawyers and other legal professionals.
She took office as a Constitutional Court judge on 31 October 2016.
