Professor Colm O'Cinneide
UCL Faculty Member
Email: c.o’cinneide@ucl.ac.uk
Research streams: Constitutional Resilience, Power, Inequality, and Democracy
Bio:
Colm O’Cinneide is Professor of Constitutional and Human Rights Law at the Faculty of Laws UCL. He has published extensively in the areas of equality and non-discrimination law, human rights and comparative constitutional law, and is currently researching how rights values can help reinforce constitutional resilience and the functioning of democratic societies. He is a graduate of University College Cork, King’s Inns and the University of Edinburgh, and served as Vice-President of the European Committee on Social Rights between 2007 and 2016. He has also acted as specialist legal advisor of the Joint Committee on Human Rights of the UK Parliament and the Women & Equalities Committee of the House of Commons, and was nominated by the Irish government as a candidate for election as a judge of the European Court of Human Rights in 2024.
Representative publications:
‘“Cruel Optimism”: The Limits of Legal Liability as a Tool for Engaging with Structural Injustice’ in Virginia Mantouvalou and Jonathan Wolff (eds), Structural Injustice and the Law (UCL Press 2024)
‘“You Can’t Go Home Again”: Constitutional Fidelity and Change in PostBrexit Britain’ in Eoin Carolan, Jason NE Varuhas and Sarah Fulham-McQuillan (eds), The Making and Re-Making of Public Law (Hart Publishing 2025)
‘Constitutional Interpretation in European Countries and the Influence of the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Union’ in Sujit Choudhry, Catherine O’Regan and Carlos Bernal-Pulido (eds), Research Handbook on Constitutional Interpretation (Elgar 2025)