Imelda Maher

Imelda Maher is the Dean of Law and the inaugural Sutherland Full Professor of European Law. She is interested in the relationship between law and governance especially in economic spheres. She has published extensively in competition law and also on EU governance and presents her work regularly at international conferences and workshops. She was general editor of Legal Studies (2012-2017) and is a member of the editorial boards of the European Law Journal and of the Irish Yearbook of International Law.

Before returning to Ireland in 2006, she worked at the London School of Economics; the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University (where she was Director of the Centre for Competition and Consumer Policy); Birkbeck College, University of London; and Warwick University. She also has held Fellowships, visiting or adjunct appointments at The Europe Centre, Australian National University; The Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, London; Lund University, Sweden; Loyola University School of Law, Chicago, Notre Dame Law School (London); Peking University School of Transnational Law; Sydney University School of Law. In 2008 she gave the prestigious general course lectures on economic law and governance at the Academy of European Law, European University Institute, Florence.

Professor Maher is a graduate of UCD (BCL), holds an LLM from Temple University and a Barrister-at-Law degree from the Kings Inns. She was elected as a member of the UCD Governing Authority from 2013-2019 and is a member of the National University of Ireland Senate from 2018-2023.

Elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2011 she was Secretary for Polite Literature and Antiquities for the Humanities and Social Sciences from 2014-2018. She served on the Board of the Irish Humanities Alliance from 2015-2018 and is a founding member of the European Law Institute (Vienna). She was the first Irish woman to become President of the Society of Legal Scholars of the UK and Ireland (2016-2017), the largest scholarly society of common lawyers in Europe and hosted the SLS Annual Conference in September 2017 at the Sutherland School. She was Academic Director for the UCD Sutherland School of Law building project from 2007-2013 (when the new building opened). Professor Maher was nominated an Honorary Bencher of Middle Temple in November 2018.