Dr. James Rooney
Teaching Fellow, Law

I am a Teaching Fellow in the School of Law, and am currently taking the the Foundations of Law I, Mooting, and Clinical Legal Education modules. Alongside these, I take a dissertation group for final year students, examining comparative constitutional law. I am a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, the University of Oxford, and the Honorable Society of the Kings Inns. From 2016 - 2017, I was the Oxford Human Rights Hub Travelling Fellow, and a Research Fellow at Rhodes University in Makhanda, South Africa.

My primary area of academic research is in constitutional law, particularly examining Irish constitutional law from a comparative perspective. My doctorate researched social rights protection in Ireland and placed the Irish experience in a comparative context alongside other common law countries. For this research, I received a Government of Ireland postgraduate scholarship, as well as a postgraduate studentship from Trinity College Dublin. Alongside this, I am very interested in judicial culture, and how this can impact upon rights protection.

I am also a practising barrister, having been called to the Bar of Ireland in 2020. I specialise in public law, particularly childcare, employment, immigration, equality law, and constitutional law. From 2021 - 2022 I was the Catherine McGuinness Fellow in Children's Rights and Child Law, at the Children's Rights Alliance.