May 2016 NUI Galway Law Student Wins Prestigious Fulbright Scholarship

Ruth Cormican, from Clarinbridge, Co. Galway and LLB student at NUI Galway’s School of Law, has been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study for an LLM in International Human Rights Law at the University of Notre Dame in the United States. This is one of the most prestigious programmes of its kind in the United States. 

Ruth is especially interested in studying the application of human rights laws and norms to transnational corporations. Following her studies, she hopes to engage in field-work with a human rights NGO or with the Human Rights Unit of the Department of Foreign Affairs.

Ruth graduated with first-class honours from the BA (Law) programme at NUI Galway in 2015, during which she spent a year at the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium. She has received academic prizes for her fluency in French, and was the recipient of the Thomson-Reuters-Round Hall Law Prize in 2012, and the Lexis Nexis Butterworths Law Prize in 2015.  Ruth will graduate from the LLB programme at NUI Galway in October.

She is spending the summer on a summer internship programme, now in its third year, run by the School of Law at NUI Galway in partnership with the Suffolk University Law School in Boston. Ruth will spend the summer working with two criminal justice NGOs: Prisoner Legal Services and the New England Innocence Project.

Congratulating Ruth on the Scholarship, Professor Donncha O’Connell, Head of NUI Galway’s School of Law, said: “It is a great credit to Ruth, and my colleagues who taught her, that her academic accomplishments have been recognised in this way. The Fulbright scheme is the gold standard of academic recognition and for someone as young as Ruth to be the recipient of a Fulbright award augurs extremely well for her future. We are immensely proud of her and wish her continued success.”

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