Dean’s Welcome

Welcome to the website of the UCD School of Law. The School has outstanding faculty and students supported by an excellent administrative team and was identified by the authoritative QS World University Rankings as being amongst the world’s one hundred leading law schools in 2011. The School’s teaching and research activities are characterised by successful programmes of international and interdisciplinary engagement at the forefront of contemporary understandings of law. The School’s activities are informed by a belief that a critical understanding is vital both to understanding the significance of law for social and economic life, and for enabling academic staff, students and graduates to contribute to legal and public policy changes.

The School celebrates one hundred years of UCD law graduates in 2011-12. Since 1911 our educational mission has remained at the heart of our endeavours and today our wide range of high quality undergraduate degree programmes encourage the development of both a critical understanding of law and the enhancement of legal and interdisciplinary knowledge and skills. Our students enjoy extensive opportunities to study abroad and to develop their skills through participation in extracurricular activities such as debating, mooting and provision of legal services to students, alongside the more general range of society activities and events that UCD has to offer.

At graduate level we have a wide variety of study programmes towards Masters and Doctoral degrees and Diplomas. The School offers both general and specialised masters programmes for law and non-law graduates. Specialised Masters in Laws (LLM) programmes include those in Commercial Law, Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law and the interdisciplinary programmes in Human Rights, European Law and Public Affairs and Criminology (LLM or MSc). LLM students have a study abroad option leading towards the award of a Certificate in Comparative, International and European Law (CIEL). The School also offers the two year Masters in Common Law (MCL) for non-law graduates seeking to take the appropriate recognised courses for a career in the legal professions. The School attracts many students from all over the world to its structured PhD programmes in Law and in European Law and Governance. The long-standing Diploma programmes in Arbitration and Employment Law offer the possibility of developing new professional expertise and have recently been complemented by new programmes in Financial Services Law and Regulatory Governance. The programmes are complemented by our provision of continuing professional development (CPD) training through the UCD Centre for Commercial Law.

The School’s outstanding reputation for research spans most of the main fields of law. Academic staff and research students in the School routinely publish their research in leading scholarly journals and books published by the main academic presses. The interdisciplinary and international character of much of the School’s research is reflected in the school’s main research centres, the UCD Institute of Criminology and the UCD Centre for Regulation and Governance and in groups addressing human rights and constitutional studies. Research in the School has a key role both in influencing the development of the legal system and in informing public policy, for example in the scrutiny of governmental activities in the field of human rights, employment law reform and the codification of the criminal law. Students have the opportunity to develop experience in writing, publishing and editing through participation in the activities of the UCD Law Review. Academic staff in the School are extensively involved in editing and advising on the publication of scholarly work. The leading Irish law journal, the Irish Jurist, and Legal Studies, the journal of the Society of Legal Scholars of United Kingdom and Ireland, are both edited in the School.

As we celebrate 100 years of law graduates at UCD we are looking forward to moving into the new Sutherland School of Law made possible by a major gift from Peter Sutherland SC and by other donors. The first purpose built law school in Ireland for over two hundred years, it will incorporate stunning new facilities to support innovative teaching and research, with even better opportunities to link academic knowledge to the development of skills in the new Clinical Legal Education Centre. The inclusive and dynamic environment offered by these new facilities will further support the School in its quest for academic excellence across its programmes of education and research and facilitate deeper engagement with the legal community and civil society at all levels.

Colin Scott