Claire Murray is a Senior Lecturer in Law. She is a graduate of University College Cork (BCL, 2004; PhD, 2010; MA, 2013) and King's Inns (BL, 2008). She was awarded an IRCHSS Government of Ireland Scholarship to fund her PhD research and completed her thesis, "Feminism, Rights and Mental Health Law: Analysing the Contribution of Feminist Theories of Rights to Irish Mental Health Law", in 2009. She joined the Law School in 2010 having previously practiced as a barrister and worked as the principal legal researcher on the Law Reform Commission's project on Legal Aspects of Family Relationships. She was a Visiting Scholar at the Feminism and Legal Theory Project, School of Law, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia in 2012; at the Centre for Gender, Law and Sexuality at Kent Law School in 2013; and at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, in 2018. From May 2023 to April 2024 she was the Interim Director of the University Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Unit. Claire's research interests lie broadly in the areas of maternal and reproductive rights, and mental health and capacity law. She was the Principal Investigator on both the Wellcome Trust funded ELPIN Project (Ethics, Law and Pregnancy in Ireland Network) and the IRC New Foundations funded CPAC Project (Conscientious Provision of Abortion Care in Ireland: The Role of Law). She was also a collaborator on the PLACES Project (Pregnancy Loss in Workplaces: Informing policymakers on support mechanisms) led by Professor Keelin O'Donoghue and funded by the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth.

My current research focuses on mental health and capacity law, and maternal and reproductive rights. I am particularly interested in the role of capacity in respecting decision-making in the context of pregnancy and childbirth, and in considering how best to achieve supported decision-making in this context. I contributed a chapter on this to the edited collection Women's Birthing Bodies: Unauthorised Intimate Examinations, Power and Vulnerability (Hart, 2020). I was the Principal Investigator for the Wellcome Trust funded ELPIN project and the IRC funded CPAC project. I was also a member of the research team on the PLACES Project which was commissioned to examine the workplace experiences of people coping with pregnancy loss and to establish whether policy interventions are required in the workplace to better support people following pregnancy loss. I am also interested in raising questions and developing thinking around the gendered impacts of mental health frameworks and applying feminist theories of law (in particular relationality) in the context of mental health and capacity law. I am available to supervise doctoral research in the areas of mental health and capacity law, and maternal and reproductive rights. My previous research considered the role of carers and families within the mental health system in Ireland and the role of the State in supporting people in these positions. This work draws on feminist theories of the situated subject and engages with the concept of vulnerability as an inherent human characteristic. I jointly edited a collection of essays entitled Ethical and Legal Debates in Irish Healthcare: Confronting Complexities, published by Manchester University Press in 2016, and I contributed a chapter to this collection on carers in mental health law. I was also involved in the No

In my teaching I aim not only to communicate information about the legal rules and structures to students but also to challenge them to engage critically with the material. I believe that students should have an awareness of the role of law in society and the interplay between law and policy and to this end I encourage students in my classes to explore and to question. Ultimately I want my students to be able to draw links between the core principles and doctrines they are studying and to understand the law as a system rather than a series of distinct subjects. I am the module coordinator for LW2250 and I teach on both LW2250 and LW2249.