Miro Cerar

Miroslav Cerar Jr. ( Slovene pronunciation: [ˈmíːɾɔslaw ˈtsɛ̀ːɾaɾ], known as Miro Cerar [ˈmíːrɔ -];) (born 25 August 1963) is a Slovenian law professor and politician. He was Prime Minister of Slovenia, leading the 12th Government. He served as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs in the 13th Government. He is a full professor at the Chair of Theory and Sociology of Law at the University of Ljubljana Faculty of Law.

Cerar was born on 25 August 1963. After graduating in law, he was employed by the Ljubljana Faculty of Law. In the late 1980s, he actively participated in the efforts for the democratisation and state independence of Slovenia. In 1990 and 1991, he participated in drafting the Basic Constitutional Charter on the Sovereignty and Independence of the Republic of Slovenia and the Constitution of the Republic of Slovenia. Between 1992 and 2014, he was a lecturer at the Faculty of Law of Ljubljana University, and an external adviser to the National Assembly of the Republic of Slovenia for constitutional and other legal matters. In 2008, as a Fulbright Fellow, he lectured on comparative constitutional law at the Golden Gate University School of Law in San Francisco and pursued post-doctoral studies at the University of California School of Law at Berkeley. Before entering politics in 2014, he was known as a jurist and intellectual specialising in the interpretation of constitutionality and the legality of the operation of state authorities. He advocated the rule of law, constitutional democracy, improved legal culture and higher ethical standards in the society. In the 2000–2018 period, in the annual polls conducted by the Ius Software portal (iusinfo.si), he ranked among ten most influential Slovenian lawyers 17 times, and in the 2011–2014 period, users of the Tax Fin-Lex portal voted him the most influential Slovenian legal expert four times.