About
Between the courtroom and academic research on AI and robotics.
Janko Munjić is a Senior Judicial Assistant in the Criminal Department of the Appellate Court in Kragujevac and a PhD Candidate in Criminal Law at the University of Kragujevac Faculty of Law.
His work focuses on criminal responsibility, artificial intelligence, robotics, digital evidence and the transformation of justice. It connects judicial practice with academic research on responsibility gaps, AI-mediated decision-making and standards for technologically complex evidence in criminal proceedings.
Since November 2020, he has been continuously involved in the work of the Serbian judiciary, and his engagement with the legal questions of artificial intelligence dates from the same period. He defended his LL.M. thesis on legal issues within artificial intelligence systems in November 2021, passed the Serbian bar examination in June 2023, and is currently preparing his doctoral dissertation.
Alongside his judicial and research work, he was engaged for several academic years in teaching activities within the criminal-law subject area, and now gives invited lectures on criminal law, artificial intelligence, digital evidence and judicial modernisation.
He has presented his research at international conferences across Europe and received the Best Paper Award at WeRobot 2026 in Berlin for his paper on hybrid intention and a test for posthuman agents.
His position in the criminal judiciary gives the research a practical grounding. Artificial intelligence, robotics and digital evidence reach the courts as questions of legal categories, procedure and proof, and his work approaches them on those terms.
A personal note
“Do not go where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
I work where criminal law meets systems that were never part of its original design.
Most of my time belongs to courtroom practice, in the Criminal Department of the Appellate Court in Kragujevac. The rest belongs to a question with hard edges, one that practice keeps raising and doctrine has not yet settled. When harm is produced through an AI system, a robotic interface, or a neuroprosthetic, who is actually responsible, and how can a court prove it?
Criminal law has long assumed a bounded human agent behind every punishable act. Intelligent and digitally mediated environments unsettle that assumption. What I try to do is keep responsibility assessable in those settings without giving up the requirement of culpability.
None of this followed a marked route. It began as a doctoral question in Kragujevac and has since been read and argued in rooms I had not counted on, from Berlin to Paris. The field is still being drawn, and the ground worth covering is rarely where the map already points. That is the part of the work I care about most.
Why this profile is unusual
Three things rarely found together: judicial practice, doctoral criminal-law research, and international work on AI and robotics.
Judiciary
Senior Judicial Assistant, Criminal Department, Appellate Court in Kragujevac
Doctoral Research
PhD Candidate in Criminal Law, University of Kragujevac Faculty of Law
Recognition
Best Paper Award, WeRobot 2026
Focus
AI, robotics, digital evidence and the future of criminal responsibility
Selected credentials
Registered doctoral dissertation: “The Role and Significance of Artificial Intelligence in the Reform of Criminal Law” — in progress.
Invited peer-review work for journals such as Kutafin Law Review, Frontiers in Robotics and AI, and the Journal of Law, Market & Innovation, among others indexed in major academic databases including Scopus and Web of Science.
Scholarship participant in the AI Winter School “Introduction to AI in Law and Business” at the Faculty of Law and Administration, University of Warsaw (January 2026).
Forthcoming chapter with Cambridge Scholars Publishing, developed from work presented in Grenoble on AI-enabled judicial cooperation, fundamental rights and European legal standards.
Accepted chapter for Supernatural Law: Regulating the Paranormal, on telepathic technologies, hybrid intention and criminal responsibility for symbiotic human-technology agents.
Member of the Association of Judicial Assistants.
Recipient of the Ministry scholarship for doctoral students, awarded under Serbia's national programme supporting young researchers and doctoral candidates. See Danas coverage of the 2022 scholarship ceremony.
Selected by the Faculty of Law, University of Kragujevac as one of five top fourth-year students for the Intensive Practice Week in judicial and state institutions. Faculty notice.
Research identity
Grounded in how courts actually reason.
His work inside the criminal judiciary gives the research a practical institutional grounding. It engages the theoretical questions raised by intelligent systems from the standpoint of someone who works with criminal procedure and appellate reasoning.
International profile
A defining legal question for the coming years.
How legal systems should attribute responsibility, assess evidence and protect human rights in AI-mediated proceedings is among the central questions criminal law now faces. It is the focus of his international work.