Dalibor Čepulo is a Professor Emeritus of the University of Zagreb (professor emeritus Universitatis Zagrabiensis) since 2024. He graduated from the Faculty of Law in Zagreb, where he also received his research master’s degree in the post-graduate study in administrative and political sciences. He received a doctorate degree at the University of Zagreb with a dissertation on the modernisation of the Croatian legal system and government in the reform period 1873-1880. His professional education includes one-month education at the Faculté internationale de droit comparé at the University of Strassbourg (1987). Before joining the Faculty of Law, he was practicing lawyer in lawyer’s office and in the corporate sector, and researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History in Zagreb. He worked at the Faculty of Law in Zagreb from 1990 to the retirement in 2023 teaching courses in the field of legal history and legal culture within graduate studies and postgraduate specialist and doctoral studies. He also taught at the Faculty of Law of the University of Osijek (1999-2002). He was visiting professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Vienna (2018/2019).
He has delivered invited lectures or Erasmus lectures at the law faculties of the University of Budapest (ELTE), the Complutense University (Madrid), the University of Córdoba, Harvard University, the University of Helsinki and the University of Iceland (Reykjavik). Together with colleagues from the Department for Constitutional and Legal History of the Faculty of Law, University of Vienna he established “The Dialogues”, annual scientific colloquia of the Vienna and Zagreb departments of legal history. He also initiated regular annual professors’ and students’ cooperation of his Department with the Department of Hungarian Legal History of the Faculty of Law, University of Budapest and initiated tripartite cooperation Budapest – Vienna – Zagreb. He published six books in Croatia and one in international edition abroad, as well as a large number of research papers in Croatian, English, German and Hungarian language in Austria, Hungary, Italy, Montenegro, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia and United Kingdom. He was the editor for legal history in the Legal Lexicon and author of large number of lexicographic articles in the editions of the Miroslav Krleža Lexicographic Institute in Zagreb as well as the author of individual contributions in Österreichisches Biographisches Lexikon 1815-1950 and Handwörterbuch zur deutschen Rechtsgeschichte. He was the main researcher or collaborator in several international and Croatian research projects, in particular within the Max-Planck-Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt, at the University of Kassel and at the Central European Academy (Budapest). He participated in a large number of research conferences in a number of European countries and Croatia. Apart from researches in various Croatian and Budapest archives and libraries he also undertook researches in the Bodleian Libraries (University of Oxford) and in the School for Slavonic and East European Studies (University College London). He was a member of editorial or advisory boards in several leading Croatian and one Spanish research journal. He was a member of the Croatian Commission for UNESCO (2004-2012) and the chairman of its Committee for Social Sciences and Humanities in two terms of office. He was a vice-dean of the Faculty of Law (2012-2014), the head of the Institute for Legal History and Roman Law (2008-2013) and the head of the Department of Croatian History of Law and State from 2004 to the retirement in 2023.
