Under art. 38/2 of the Charter of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms: “Nobody may be deprived of his/hers lawful judge. The jurisdiction of courts and the competence of judges shall be prescribed by law. This is one of the most important safeguards of legality in any legal proceedings, including the criminal proceedings. This safeguard has recently proven to be a bit problematic when speaking of the preparatory criminal proceedings. For quite a long time, it followed from the section 26/1, 2 of the Code of Criminal Procedure that the local jurisdiction of a court for necessary decision-making in the preparatory proceeding was established simply with the first procedural motion filed by the public prosecutor and that this jurisdiction lasted for the rest of the preparatory proceedings. However, in its recent decision file no. Pl. ÚS 4/2014 and follow-up case law, the Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic has set forth a new approach towards the determination of the local jurisdiction of a court in the preparatory criminal proceedings, which quite shaken up the previous rules. This paper provides an analysis of this change.