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Sutherland Full Professor in European Law
Imelda is the Sutherland Full Professor of European Law at the UCD Sutherland School of Law and the newly appointed Director of the UCD Dublin European Institute. Her work is at the intersection of law and governance in the EU, including through a competition law lens where she has explored the emergence of agency networks in the competition sphere.
She has published in law and political science journals – the latter in particular part a result of her long standing collaboration with Professor Dermot Hodson. Law being jurisdictionally specific, Imelda regularly engages in research on Irish law, most recently in a series of papers with a number of co-authors (Rónán Riordan, Neža Šubic and Barry Rodger) exploring how EU law has been implemented in Irish courts between 2010-2020. This also led to the publication of a database. And in response to Brexit, she published a series of papers on the Common Travel Area as well as appearing before Oireachtas Select Committees.
Her most recent monograph is on the complexity of treaty ratification in the Member States of the EU (with Dermot Hodson), and she is currently working on a monograph on international competition law (with Marek Martyniszyn). In 2022, having completed her stint as Dean and Head of School, she was the Senior Emile Noel Global Fellow at New York University School of Law. It is here that she commenced her work on her new long term project, Law and Hope and she currently coordinates a module on Hope with a strongly interdisciplinary teaching team stretching from Art History to Veterinary Science.
She has held a number of scholarly posts including being 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 law lawyers in Europe. She was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2011, and was Secretary for Polite Literature and Antiquities for the Humanities and Social Sciences from 2014-2018 and served on the Board of the Irish Humanities Alliance from 2015-2018. Prof Maher was general editor of Legal Studies (2012-2017), is a member of the editorial advisory board of The Irish Yearbook of International Law, European Law Open and the European Law Review. She also serves on the Advisory Board of the Cambridge Centre for European Legal Studies. She was elected an Honorary Bencher of Middle Temple London in 2019 and is a founding member of the European Law Institute, Vienna.