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 Research Ireland (www.associationalfreedom.org). This project has produced a double special issue in the European Journal of Comparative Law and Governance, an interdisciplinary edited collection entitled "Associational Life and Freedom: Insights from Philosophy and Law" as well as a collection of essays from various fields within law entitled "The Sociable Person and the Law". 

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.

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 was invited by the Lord Chancellor of the UK Ministry of Justice to become a member of the Independent Human Rights Act Review panel 2020-2021. 

Her work has been published, inter alia, in the Cambridge Law Journal, the International Journal of Constitutional Law, the American Journal of Jurisprudence, the European Journal of Comparative Law and Governance, the German Law Journal and the University of Queensland Law Journal.

Maria won the Research Collaboration of the Year Award in 2024, the College of Business and Law Research Team of the Year Award in 2024, the College of Business and Law Advanced Researcher of the Year Award in 2022, the UCC Award for Creating Culture of Responsible Conduct of Research in 2022, the President's award for Enhancing the Student Experience in 2020, the President's Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2019 and the UCC Early Career Researcher of the Year award in 2017. 

My headline research interests are Freedom of Association, Subsidiarity, Sovereignty, Popular Sovereignty, Constitutional Amendability, and European Integration. 

More deeply, I am interested in questions about the priority of legal or constitutional principle over competing efficiencies, the methodology through which we value and interpret human rights, and the ways in which we articulate the role of law in a transnational/global context.

Constitutional Law, Compartive Constitutional Law, Advanced Legal Reasoning, Jurisprudence, Research Methods for PhD Researchers.

I am keen to supervise thoughtful and creative PhD researchers in the fields of constitutional law, constitutional theory, comparative constitutional law, and human rights law, with a particular interest in the rights to freedom of association, assembly, speech and religion as well as projects with relevance to themes of sovereignty, democracy, subsidiarity, transnational law and constituent power. I am happy to offer guidance in the development of a research proposal.