Dr. Máté Tóth LL.M is a fourth-year doctoral student at SZEEDSM Doctoral School of Management and Business Administration who now became the Lawyer of the Year in the category of Energy Law on the Wolters Kluwer Lawyer Award 2019.
Dr. Tóth is an attorney-at-law, energy lawyer and partner at Rátky & Partner Law Firm leading its energy practice group. He is the Hungarian representative of Associated European Energy Consultants (AEEC), member of the board of the Hungarian Energy Association (HEA) and chairman of the Interdisciplinary Division of HEA; also the managing director of Boreas Energy Consulting and a lecturer at Corvinus University Energy Economics course (teaching economists) and at the Nuclear Power Lawyer LL.M. course of Pécs University Faculty of Law and Political Science (teaching lawyers). Both university lectures (curriculum, topics and exams) are developed by his own paradigm.
Numerous lectures, press releases, studies, resolutions and publications are associated with his name in the field of energy, both domestic and international, and he is regularly interviewed on energy issues. He graduated from ELTE (Budapest) and Masarykova University (Brno), he held his LL.M. (Master of Law) degree from Boston, Suffolk University, and completes his PhD at SZEEDSM Doctoral School in 2020. He is a renowned and sought-after expert in energy law, both in Hungary and abroad, and now he became the Lawyer of the Year at the Wolters Kluwer Legal Award in 2019.
The award was created to reward the best lawyers in different fields of law. The energy law category covers active, market-leading and practicing lawyers in the entire energy industry. Máté won the Lawyer of the Year title in the category of Energy Law with an application nominating him titled “on the border between public and private law: changing the practice”.
The award was handed over by Dr. Róbert Szuchy, Habilitated Associate Professor, Deputy Dean of Education and Studies, KRE ÁJK. The winning application by the words of the jury: “the case presented successfully declares the public law nature of the funds managed by the Hungarian system operator with the Supreme Court, and with this, not only a court case previously lost in two instances is being changed, but simultaneously a decisive change in the operation of the entire industry and the nature of energy law follows”.
Máté’s research area in the SZEEDSM Doctoral Program is the transdisciplinary issue of the normativity trust from the viewpoint of regulatory systemic risk; his supervisor is Professor Gyula Vastag, vice-rector of Corvinus University (Hungary). Part of his findings relating to normativity trust issues is recently published in the Almanac of the Hungarian Commercial Court of Arbitration by the Hungarian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and Hvg Orac titled ‘Energy investment protection: is it worth?’ (406-430 pp.), whilst another aspect of his research titled ‘Hungarian Energy Law as an Example of Using Complex System Viewpoints to Understand Risks in Public Administration Normativity’ is just being published in Pro Publico Bono. The research topic is closely connected to the energy industry: Máté wants to prove that a complex systems-based method used on the practice of the public administration regulatory body of the Hungarian energy sector produces so-called errors in the ideal power-law distribution of the utilization of norms by the regulatory body that can be important indicators concerning regulatory systemic risks, one of the hot topics of today’s decision sciences and legislations as well. However, the topic is broader: proliferation of norms in indicating systemic risks in the public sector, and complex system viewpoints for the understanding of the nature of normativity relate to the normativity trust phenomenon and are relevant both in the energy sector and far beyond, contributing to an interdisciplinary way to the old dispute of understanding the nature of normativity in operation with identifying brand new utilization possibilities of complex networks theories coming from hard sciences.
