ProfessorMaebh Harding

Maebh is Professor of Family Law at UCD Sutherland School of Law. She returned to UCD in 2021 after working in UK where she held academic posts at the University of Portsmouth and at Warwick Law School.

Maebh is Professor of Family Law at UCD Sutherland School of Law. She returned to UCD in 2021 after working in UK where she held academic posts at the University of Portsmouth and at Warwick Law School.

Maebh's research combines a critical feminist perspective with empirical, historical and doctrinal rigour to challenge legal regulation of family life. Maebh is PI on reKINdle: Rethinking Law’s framing of the Parent/Child link, a €2M ERC Consolidator Grant running from 2025- 2030 (https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101171839). This project uses critical comparative law and feminist pre-figurative techniques to develop a legal understanding that works better for children and families and is fundamentally about how law relates to and understands human behaviour. For more information see www.rekindle.ie. 

Maebh's work is interdisciplinary in nature, crossing different legal and methodological fields and makes significant contributions to the areas of Family Law, Children’s Rights, Private International Law, Legal History, Law and Religion, and Law and Gender. She has published widely in internationally peer-refereed journals as well as contributing to books for highly reputable academic publishers. She is an established family law academic, co-editing of the seminal English Family Law text, Cretney's Principles of Family Law from 2015-2018. Maebh is a co-editor of Family Law in Context, a new critical textbook on Irish family law published by Clarus Press in 2023.

Maebh is a founding member of the Doing Feminist Legal Work (DFLW) network, which will bring together legal scholars across Ireland, Northern Ireland and Britain and was established by an Irish Research Council, Shared Island, New Foundations Award. Together with Dr Julie Morrissy, Maebh is a co-creator of Bunreacht Aloud  a project that performs the 1937 Irish Constitution through durational collective reading.  Bunreacht Aloud brings together poetry, art, law and different communities to make the language of the Bunreacht more accessible and spark conversation about the meaning of constitutional values in  modern Ireland.