News archive School of Law Annual Distinguished Lecture 2017

The School of Law Annual Distinguished Lecture 2017 takes place on Friday 31st March at 8pm in the Aula Maxima (Lower). This year, the Annual Distinguished Lecture will be delivered by Judge Síofra O’Leary of the European Court of Human Rights (biographical details below) and chaired by Ms Justice Iseult O’Malley of the Irish Supreme Court. The title of the lecture is: “A Tale of Two Cities: the Protection of Fundamental Rights in Strasbourg and Luxembourg”.
 
This is our eighth Annual Distinguished Lecture. Previous speakers include: Professor Christopher McCrudden of Oxford University, Judge John T. Noonan of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Professor Neil Walker of Edinburgh University, Baroness Brenda Hale of the UK Supreme Court with Mrs. Justice Catherine McGuinness of the Irish Supreme Court, Mr. Justice Nial Fennelly of the Irish Supreme Court, Sir Declan Morgan, the Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland and Professor Nicholas Canny.
 
A reception which follows the lecture in the Staff Club of the Quadrangle, NUIG. This is the School’s farewell occasion for final year students where they are introduced  to graduates and practitioners.

Biographical details of speaker:

In July 2015 Síofra O'Leary, BCL (University College Dublin), PhD (European University Institute) was sworn in as a Judge at the European Court of Human Rights, elected in respect of Ireland.
 
Prior to joining the European Court of Human Rights, Judge O’Leary worked for 18 years at the Court of Justice of the European Union, where she served as a référendaire and Chef de cabinet for Judges Aindrias Ó Caoimh (IRL), Fidelma Macken (IRL) and Federico Mancini (IT). She later ran part of that Court’s Research Directorate.
 
Judge O’Leary has been a Visiting Professor at the College of Europe in Bruges for many years where she has taught LLM courses on EU law and the individual, EU Social Law and Policy as well as a judicial workshop.
 
She has, in recent years, been a member of the Editorial Board of the Common Market Law Review and is now a member of both its Advisory Board and the Board of the Irish Centre for European Law. In 2016 she was elected an Honorary Bencher of the Honorable Society of King’s Inns.
 
Before joining the Court of Justice of the European Union, Síofra O’Leary was the Assistant Director for the Centre of European Legal Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Emmanuel College. She was previously a Visiting Fellow at the Faculty of Law, University College Dublin, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cádiz, Spain and a Research Associate at the Institute for Public Policy Research in London.
 
She is the author of two books entitled The Evolving Concept of Community Citizenship (Kluwer, 1996) and Employment Law at the European Court of Justice (Hart Publishing, 2001) and has published extensively in academic journals and EU law monographs on the protection of fundamental rights in the EU, EU employment law, the free movement of persons and services and EU citizenship generally.