I am an Associate Professor in law at Maynooth University, with primary research interests in artificial intelligence and law, international economic law, legal and political theory, empirical and experimental methods, and the overlap between them.

Academic Profile

The questions that motivate me are all about the ways law intersects with justice, power and authority. For a long time, my focus was on international economic law, and especially the institutions of the international trade regime. More recently, my work has focussed on the intersection of artificial intelligence and law, including the use of artificial intelligence tools to study legal decision-making, and the potential and limits of algorithmic decision-making in law and public administration. The focus has shifted, but the core concerns remain the same. How is power exercised through law? How does law shape who gets what? How can public power and legal authority be legitimate?

My 2018 book, Distributive Justice and World Trade Law: A Political Theory of International Economic Law (Cambridge), was awarded the prestigious Peter Birks Prize for Oustanding Legal Scholarship by the Society of Legal Scholars. Other work has been published in leading international journals, including the European Journal of International Law, the Modern Law Review, the Journal of Political Philosophy, Politics Philosophy & Economics, the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law. (See my publications here)

I joined Maynooth University in 2019. I previously worked as a Lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast (2017-19) and the University of Sheffield (2014-17) and as a Teaching Fellow at University College London (2012-14), where I completed my PhD on distributive justice in world trade law.

Before moving into full time academic work I practised as a solicitor with a leading Irish law firm, specialising in commercial dispute resolution, technology, data privacy and corporate crime.