Maria Cahill is Professor of Law at University College Cork and project lead for "Societās: Exploring the Value of Freedom of Association", a four-year Laureate project funded by the Irish Research Council (www.associationalfreedom.org). She is a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin (LLB) and the European University Institute (LLM, PhD). She lectured at the National University of Ireland, Galway, before joining the Faculty of Law at University College Cork in August 2008. She teaches Constitutional Law, Advanced Legal Reasoning, Advanced Constitutional Law and Research Methods for PhD researchers. Maria was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of European and Comparative Law at the University of Oxford in 2015 and a Kathleen Fitzpatrick Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies at the University of Melbourne in 2019. Maria's research has focussed on social groups and concepts such as subsidiarity, freedom of association and pluralism. More generally, she is interested in issues of constitutional theory (questions of amendability, constituent power, constitutional architecture), legal theory, legal history and comparative law. She won the UCC Early Career Researcher of the Year award in 2017, the President's Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2019 and the President's award for Enhancing the Student Experience in 2020.

Maria's research has focussed on subsidiarity (as a concept, in its interaction with sovereignty and liberalism, in its application within the European Union and the Council of Europe, in the context of fundamental rights adjudication, and so on), as well as pluralism and freedom of association. She is generally interested in issues of constitutional theory (questions of amendability, constituent power, constitutional architecture), legal theory, legal history and comparative law.

Maria teaches Constitutional Law, Constitutional Theory and Advanced Legal Reasoning, and has a particular interest in inverted learning approaches within the scholarship of teaching and learning.

I am open to PhD supervision in the broad fields of

constitutional law, constitutional theory, comparative constitutional law, human rights, especially the rights to freedom of association, assembly, speech and religion, as well as themes relating to sovereignty, democracy, subsidiarity, transnational law and constituent power.