Irish Legal Scholarship Abroad: The UK Experience

• Main Author: Maher, Imelda
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Round Hall 2018
• Subjects: Irish law; Irish diaspora; Public intellectuals; Canada; Griffith; Iceland
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10197/9325

Emigration has been a significant feature of Irish life and, in more recent years, of Irish academic life also. This is despite – or because of - the growth in the number of Law Schools and law programmes in Ireland. There were four university Law Schools in 1980, the largest of which (UCD) had twelve academic staff. There are now seven university Law Schools with over 140 academic staff. In addition, several of the thirteen Institutes of Technology offer law degrees even though they do not have designated law departments. Letterkenny IT and Dublin IT, have a Department of Law and Humanities and a School of Social Sciences and Law respectively. Private colleges – DSB/Portobello, Griffith, Hibernia, and Independent Colleges – also offer law degrees. As the numbers graduating from Irish universities have increased, there has been an outflow of academics going overseas either through necessity or interest. Thus a brief trawl through the web brings to light Irish-educated academics based in Canada, France, Iceland, the Netherlands, the UK and the United States. This chapter offers a brief reflection on the cadre of Irish academics overseas and is prompted by a reflection on what is Irish legal scholarship. Is it scholarship exclusively about Irish law or scholarship produced by scholars based in Ireland or does it extend to Irish educated scholars based outside of Ireland who may or may not write about Irish law? The suggestion made here is that we should have regard to this last category of scholars in exploring the nature of Irish legal scholarship. In doing so, it adopts a broad brush examination of a particular group of scholars defined not by their research interests in a field of substantive law but by the fact that having received (some of) their tertiary education in Ireland, they are now academics based in the UK. The chapter first offers a brief reflection on what is a scholar and intellectual before turning to the Irish scholar in the UK and the data on publications about Irish law in Ireland, elsewhere and other publications. It then concludes.