Lecturer/Assistant Professor
Maebh returned to UCD Sutherland School of Law in 2021 after becoming an established family law expert within British academia for over 10 years. Her widely cited research investigating court promotion of shared parenting arrangements in the English courts has has significantly impacted policy and practice.
Maebh is a founding member of the Doing Feminist Legal Work (DFLW) network, which brings together legal scholars across Ireland, Northern Ireland and Britain and is funded by an Irish Research Council Shared Island-New Foundations Award.
Irish law has marginalised the lived experiences of women and children in its regulation of family life. On my return to Irish academia I resolved to approach the teaching and research of family law issues in Ireland very differently, building collaborative networks to critique and understand what law does, in a much more inclusive and contextual way.
DFLW pushes the boundaries of feminist thinking and legal work to promote a more inclusive idea of what law is and can be across Ireland. It consolidates existing ad hoc networks into a permanent collective, building on important collaborative feminist work such as the Northern/Irish Feminist Legal Judgments Project (Bloomsbury, 2017), the Mother and Baby Homes Report: Reaching Different Conclusions, and the Northern/Ireland Feminist Constitutions project. DFLW is an inclusive, supportive network that provides support and mentoring to academics engaged in feminist legal work.
Maebh is passionate about contextual research-led teaching and co-founded a pedagogic teaching network, Irish Family Law in Context, with Dr Deirdre McGowan from TU Dublin in 2022. The network's revolutionary multi-authored textbook on Irish Family Law, Family Law in Context, will be published by Clarus press later this year.