Professor Colin Scott
Registrar and Deputy President
Professor Colin Scott was appointed UCD Registrar, Deputy President and Vice President for Academic Affairs for a ten-year term commencing 1 December 2023. He was originally appointed to UCD as Professor of EU Regulation and Governance in 2006 and subsequently has served as Vice-Principal for Research and Innovation in UCD College of Business and Law (2006-2009), Dean of Law (2011-2014), Principal of UCD College of Social Sciences and Law (2014-2023), Dean of Social Sciences (2017-2023) and Vice-President for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (2017-2024). Professor Scott has previously held academic posts at the London School of Economics (where he completed his undergraduate education in law followed by graduate study at Osgoode Hall Law School of York University, Toronto), the University of Warwick, the Australian National University and the College of Europe Bruges.
Throughout his career Professor Scott has been an innovator in education and research. He was a core member of the Law Courseware Consortium which built early versions of interactive digital learning materials across the core law curriculum in England and Wales (subsequently extended to Australia) in 1993-4. He was the first director of the innovative interdisciplinary MSc Regulation programme at LSE in 1995 and the first director of the structured PhD programme in Law at UCD in 2006. He led on curriculum reforms in Law, introducing wide-ranging experiential learning and clinical themes to legal education at UCD from 2011 and was Dean of Law at the time of completing fundraising, building and opening the Sutherland School of Law building in 2013. In social sciences he initiated the reform of undergraduate education and the establishment of the general entry Social Sciences programme in 2018, with its emphasis on students as partners, internship and exchange opportunities, interdisciplinarity, methods and research skills. He has sponsored wider reforms and diversification of education in social sciences and law at undergraduate, taught graduate and research levels.
The main focus of Professor Scott’s research has been on themes of fragmentation and accountability in regulatory governance across domains as diverse as regulation of business, regulation of the public sector, EU, international, transnational and private regulation. He has led and co-led projects on the regulation of telecommunications, regulation of the public sector (including prisons, higher education and the civil service), meta-regulation, transnational private regulation and the regulatory state in Ireland. He is a co-creator of the Irish State Administration Database, published in 2008, and which is now the longest time series database detailing changes in central state administrations in the world, updated to cover the whole first century of the Irish state.
Professor Scott has held editorial responsibilities with a wide range of legal and interdisciplinary journals including The Modern Law Review, Law and Policy, Administration and Legal Studies and served on the Editorial Board of The Conversation UK from 2017-2023. He was a Board Member of the Institute of Public Administration 2014-2016 and has been a member of the Irish Research Council since 2021 and a Taoiseach’s independent member of the National Economic and Social Council since 2022. He was appointed a director of the Central Applications Office and as a member of the Senate of the National University of Ireland in 2024.