At the 2023 Annual General Meeting of the Budapest Bar Association, Prof. Dr. István Varga was awarded the Eötvös Károly Prize for his outstanding work as a lawyer. The Eötvös Károly Award is the highest professional award within the Budapest Bar Association. It is awarded by the current members of the Board and the Eötvös Károly Prize winners.
In honour of Prof. Dr. István Varga at the 2023 Annual General Meeting of the Budapest Bar Association
Prof. Dr. István Varga is Professor at the Department of Civil Procedural Law of Eötvös Loránd University, Head of the Civil Litigation and Arbitration Practice Group of PROVARIS Varga & Partners.
The main stages of his professional career have been as follows: he studied humanities and law in parallel, partly in Budapest, and more at foreign universities. In 1997 he obtained his first degree in German language and literature, and in the same year – after several firsts in his class, a special prize at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and a first place in the civil speech competition – he obtained a law degree summa cum laude at the Faculty of Law of ELTE. He started his practical legal work under his dear teacher and paternal mentor, Professor János Németh, and became an advisor to the second President of the Constitutional Court between 1998-2003, and at the same time assistant lecturer, then adjunct professor, and later associate professor at the Department of Civil Procedural Law of ELTE. As a result of his research in civil procedural law and arbitration procedure at universities abroad, mainly in Germany and the United States, he obtained a PhD degree summa cum laude in Germany in 2005. His book on international arbitration procedural law, written in German and published jointly by leading legal publishers C.H. Beck – Nomos, was awarded the First Prize of the German Chamber of Industry and Commerce and the German Permanent Court of Arbitration (DIS) in 2006. After his return home, he was admitted to the Budapest Bar in 2007 and has been an active lawyer since then.
Professor István Varga is a leading authority in the field of civil procedural law, both nationally and internationally. Since 2007 he has been the head of the Department of Civil Procedural Law at ELTE, and between 2008 and 2022 he was the Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Law at ELTE for four terms. He is credited with the creation and operation of the ELTE Lippay Foundation, which has now exceeded 100 volumes and is the main publisher of law books at ELTE, as well as the ELTE Lippay Foundation for outstanding and needy law students. He was appointed professor by the President of the Republic in 2015. From 2013 to 2016, he was a member and academic secretary of the High Committee for the Codification of Civil Procedure, and the chairman of the new Civil Procedure Code. Author of the drafting of the Expert Proposal for the new Civil Procedure Code, and chair of the codification working committees. In 2018, with the entry into force of the new Arbitration Act, he was the author of the New Permanent Arbitration Rules of the Hungarian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, a member of several case law analysis groups of the Curia, and since 2020 he has been the head of the Private Law Workshop of the Mathias Corvinus Collegium. In addition to his work as a lawyer and academic in his home country, he has been a visiting professor at several universities abroad (Göttingen, Leipzig, Beijing, Kyoto), a senior lecturer at the English section of the Hague Academy of International Law from 2011-2012 and an honorary professor at the University of Leipzig since 2016. He is a member of the ELI-UNIDROIT working group preparing the text of the forthcoming European Model Law on Civil Procedure, editor and co-author of leading commentaries on civil procedure and arbitration law published in Hungarian, German and English, regular speaker at foreign conferences on procedural law, arbitrator of several foreign and international arbitral tribunals (ICC, DIS, VIAC), arbitrator of Hungary at the International Court of Arbitration for Investment and Development (ICSID, Washington DC) between 2014-2021. As a lawyer in the association of lawyers he heads, he is primarily involved in litigation and arbitration before both domestic and foreign courts, and has also acted as counsel before the Court of Justice of the European Union in a number of high-profile cases.