Professor Cathryn Costello and Dr Maebh Harding awarded European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grants
Professor Cathryn Costello (l) and Dr Maebh Harding (r)
The Sutherland School of Law is proud to announce that Professor Cathryn Costello and Dr Maebh Harding were awarded prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator grants in December 2024. They are two of five University College Dublin researchers awarded €2 million for their projects at this time - the highest number awarded to an Irish university in one call.
These two additional awards bring to seven the overall total of ERC grants awarded to the School. Six of these projects will run in parallel in the School by the end of 2025, an unprecedented number for any law school this size in Europe.
Details of these groundbreaking projects from our two colleagues are outlined below:
Professor Cathryn Costello: RefLex: Is International Refugee Law Effective?
RefLex entails a global comparative study of the workings and effectiveness of International Refugee Law (IRL), a body of international law that is implemented, domesticated and judicialised to varying degrees across the world.
“RefLex aims to provide vital insights at a time when the global refugee regime is increasingly adrift from International Law," said Professor Cathryn Costello. "I am thrilled to have the opportunity to work with two scholars I admire immensely – Professors Lamis Abdelaaty (Syracuse University, USA) and Ashwini Vasanthakumar (Queen’s University, Canada) – and to build a new research team to work at the cutting edge of research on international law and politics.”
Professor Costello is a leading scholar of international refugee and migration law and has pioneered the study of the intersection of labour and migration law. Professor Costello has a DPhil in Law from the University of Oxford, an LLM from the College of Europe, Bruges, and a BCL from University College Cork. Prior to joining UCD Sutherland School of Law in 2023, she was Professor of International Refugee and Migration Law at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford.
Dr Maebh Harding: Redefining Legal Parenthood as a Legal Interdependency between Parent and Child (REDEFPARENT)
Dr Harding’s project provides a new way to think about the legal nexus between parent and child as a two-way legal interdependency. This new legal conceptualisation will reflect the interests of both parents and children and recognise that obligations and vulnerabilities fluctuate over the life course.
Reassessing the very basis of family law, the project will interrogate the historical, legal and social dimensions of legal parenthood in Ireland, England and Wales, Sweden and Poland to expose the gaps between the regulatory work that the concept of legal parenthood is currently doing and the social expectations that are placed on the concept.
“This new way of thinking will be groundbreaking to how we understand the obligations and vulnerabilities of family life," said Dr Maebh Harding.
Dr Harding joined UCD Sutherland School of Law in 2021 after 13 years as a Family Law academic in England and Wales at the University of Portsmouth and later as Associate Professor at Warwick Law School. She is widely published on family law, most recently co-editing, Family Law in Context (Clarus Press 2023) with Dr Deirdre McGowan from TU Dublin. She is a founding member of the Doing Feminist Legal Work (DFLW) network (opens in a new window)ww.dflw.ie.
Details of the five UCD academics who were awarded ERC Consolidator Grants in December 2024 can be read here.