Date: 31 March2017
Time: 8pm
Venue: Aula Maxima, NUIG
The NUIG School of Law Annual Distinguished Lecture 2017 will this year be delivered by Judge Síofra O’Leary of the European Court of Human Rights. The title of her lecture will be “A Tale of Two Cities: the Protection of Fundamental Rights in Strasbourg and Luxembourg”. The event, which takes place at 8pm on Friday 31st March in the Aula Maxima (Lower) will be chaired by Ms Justice Iseult O’Malley of the Irish Supreme Court. The lecture is held annually to mark the end of the academic year and to bid farewell to Final Year law students and provide an opportunity for them to be introduced to members of the NUIG Law School alumni community as they embark on the next stage of their careers.
In the past, the annual lecture has been delivered by: Professor Christopher McCrudden of Oxford University, Baroness Brenda Hale of the UK Supreme Court with Ms. Justice Catherine McGuinness of the Irish Supreme Court, Judge John T. Noonan of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Professor Neil Walker of Edinburgh University and Mr. Justice Nial Fennelly of the Irish Supreme Court, Sir Declan Morgan, the Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland and Professor Nicholas Canny.
Announcing this year’s event, Professor Donncha O’Connell, Head of the School of Law, said: “Judge Síofra O’Leary is an immensely distinguished jurist of great international standing whose lecture will, I am certain, be of tremendous interest to our students and alumni. It is also a great honour for the School of Law to have Ms Justice Iseult O’Malley of the Irish Supreme Court – a person with strong family links to Galway – as chairperson for this event.”
Biographical note on Judge Síofra O’Leary:
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.