Nika Bačić Selanec is Assistant Professor at the University of Zagreb Faculty of Law, Department of European Public Law. She holds the Jean Monnet Module on “EU Constitutional Law and Methodology” and co-coordinates the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence “Reinforcing the Rule of Law and EU Values”.
She has been working at the Department since 2015. She graduated from the Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb in 2012, and obtained her LLM degree at the University of Michigan Law School in 2014 as a Hugo Grotius Fellow, having received a full scholarship, a certificate of merit, and a Kouba prize for the best paper on European integration. In 2016, she worked as a stagiaire at the Court of Justice of the EU, in the cabinets of Judge Siniša Rodin and Advocate General Eleanor Sharpston. In 2018, she was a Grotius Research Fellow at the University of Michigan Law School. Under a joint mentorship of professor Iris Goldner Lang, Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb, and professor Daniel Halberstam, University of Michigan Law School, she defended her doctoral dissertation entitled A Realist Account of EU Citizenship in front of an international defence committee in Zagreb on 5 March 2019 (summa cum laude).
Her academic interests and expertise include EU constitutional law, judicial methodologies and theories of adjudication, EU citizenship and migration law. She has participated in a number of conferences and published a number of articles or book chapters on these topics. Her work has been published in top journals in EU legal scholarship, such as the European Law Review, European Constitutional Law Review and Common Market Law Review. Her ELRev article on the recognition of same-sex marriages of EU citizens has been cited by Advocate General Wathelet in his Opinion in Case C-673/16 Coman; while her CYELP article on the EU’s response to the refugee crisis has been awarded an Odysseus Network special recognition for outstanding young researchers’ publication in EU asylum and immigration law.
At the Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb, she teaches an undergraduate course and a seminar on European public law, a graduate course on EU constitutional law and a postgraduate course on methodology of EU law. She also teaches EU constitutional law at the master-level program of the Faculty of Political Sciences of the University of Zagreb. She regularly lectures on EU law at the Croatian Judicial Academy.
She has participated in a number of international academic projects. Currently, she co-coordinates the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence “Reinforcing the Rule of Law and EU Values” and is the principal programme author and member of NextGenerationEU project EUkrit (“Critical Perspectives to the Protection of Fundamental Rights and Constitutional Principles in the EU”). She was the project leader of Jean Monnet Module “EU Constitutional Law and Methodology”, an academic staff member of the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence “EU Global Leadership in the Rule of Law”, a research assistant at the UNESCO Chair on Free Movement of People, Migration and Inter-Cultural Dialogue, an academic staff member of Jean Monnet Chair ‘Global Effects of EU Law’ at the University of Zagreb, as well as the Croatian expert team member in the international Odysseus Jean Monnet Network for Immigration and Asylum (project holder: Institute for European Studies of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB)) and the ACTIONES project (Active Charter Training through Interaction Of National ExperienceS; project holder: European University Institute).
From 2017 to 2024, she served as Executive Editor of the Croatian Yearbook of European Law and Policy (CYELP), which was declared the best law journal in Croatia by SCOPUS in 2020. She currently serves as a member of its Editorial Board.
She is the president of the Croatian European Union Studies Association (CEUSA, Croatian affiliate of ECSA).
