Maria Cahill

Research Associate
Programme for the Foundations of Law and Constitutional Government

Biography

Maria Cahill is a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin (LLB, 2003) and the European University Institute (LLM, 2004; PhD 2008). She lectured at the National University of Ireland, Galway, before joining the Faculty of Law at University College Cork in August 2008. She was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of European and Comparative Law at the University of Oxford in 2015. Her work has been published in the International Journal of Constitutional Law, Cambridge Law Journal, American Journal of Jurisprudence, German Law Journal, Dublin University Law Journal, Irish Jurist, and the Irish Journal of European Law. As a result, her ideas have been relied on in a judgment of the Court of Criminal Appeal and informed arguments in cases before the High Court and Supreme Court of Ireland as well as the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. In 2017, Dr Cahill received the Early Stage Researcher of the Year Award at University College Cork. She is a Research Associate of the Programme for the Foundations of Law and Constitutional Government, in the University of Oxford's Faculty of Law.

Research Interests

Dr Cahill's research has focused 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). She is generally interested in issues of constitutional theory (questions of amendability, constituent power, constitutional architecture), legal theory, legal history and comparative law.