Muromtsev was a Russian nobleman from Tula and a Professor of Roman Law at Moscow University.

He was much praised for the way he chaired the debates, always keeping to the strictest legality but always pursuing a constitutional and anti-autocratic agenda.

His funeral, at the New Donskoy Cemetery on 7 October 1910, was the occasion of one of the first public demonstrations of support for constitutional ideas since the dissolution of the Duma.

In the 1870s, he advanced the then-novel sociological approach for the study of law, employing the functional (функционального) and historical comparative ("историко-сравнительного") methods.

From 1879 to 1892, Muromtsev was the co-editor, along with Maksim Kovalevsky of the law journal Juridical Vestnik («Юридический Вестник»).