Assoc ProfessorSara Benedí Lahuerta

Dr. Sara Benedi Lahuerta joined University College Dublin (UCD), Sutherland School of Law, in December 2019. Previously, she was a Lecturer in Employment Law at the University of Southampton Law School (UK) (2014-19) and the founding Director of the Stefan Cross Research Centre for Women, Equality and Law (2018-19).

Sara’s research focuses on discrimination and employment law (at EU and comparative levels). She is particularly interested in avenues to improve the effectiveness of equality law through a range of regulatory tools like equality bodies, positive duties, ADR, and collective remedies. Her current research projects concern the analysis of pay transparency regulation to address the Gender Pay Gap and EU policies to address hate speech. Other recent projects include: ‘Rethinking EU Equality Law’ (2016-18) and ‘The impact of Brexit on EU nationals’ vulnerability: the case of Polish nationals’ (2018-19). She also participated in the project: ‘Future Directions in EU Labour Law’ (2015-16), coordinated by Prof. Prassl (University of Oxford).

She has written articles on the collective enforcement of equality law, European equality bodies, the European Social Pillar, the links between migration and discrimination. Her research has been published in leading journals, including the Common Market Law Review, the European Law Journal, the European Labour Law Journal. She is interested in applying a wide range of methodologies to legal research, and has experience both with doctrinal and empirical socio-legal research (including qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods).

Sara regularly acts as an expert evaluator for the European Commission’s funding programmes (e.g. ‘Rights, Equality and Citizenship Programme’) and for the European Research Executive Agency (REA). She is regularly invited to speak at the Academy of European Law (ERA) and to act as a peer reviewer for various journals. Within the Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality & Anti-Discrimination Law (BCCE), she is the Co-Director of the Pay Equity & Living Wage Working Group (with Stephanie Bornstein) and the former BCCE E-journal Editor-in-Chief. She is also a Fellow of the UCD Geary Institute for Public Policy and the Co-Convenor of the UCD's Equality Studies Centre Cluster on Equality, Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Research (with Judy Walsh). She also acted as a guest editor for a special issue of the International Journal of Discrimination and the Law.

Sara holds a Ph.D. from the University of Leicester (2015), an LLM in EU Law from the College of Europe (2008), and a double degree in Law and Business ("Doble Licenciatura") from the University of Zaragoza (2007). She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (UK) and has been nominated twice (2019/20, 2021/22) for the UCD Teaching Excellence Award. Prior to joining UCD, she also received several teaching awards from the University of Southampton (Vice-Chancellor’s Teaching Award at Faculty Level in 2018 and short-listed for the Virtual Learning Environment Awards in 2016).

She has been a trainee at the European Commission and an academic assistant at the College of Europe. Sara is a qualified Spanish lawyer and previously worked as an in-house lawyer in the private sector.