Maria Cahill

University College Cork | UCC · Faculty of Law

This article lays out how the right to freedom of association is protected by the European Court of Human Rights interpreting Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Part I considers how the Court defines "associations" and how it has developed three component aspects of the right: the right to form associations, the right not to be...

This article centers on the idea that there is a non-fungible value inherent in local associations. It uses the work of Paul Kahn to animate what that value might be and to consider why law might not have a clear sightline to it. In Democracy in Our America, Kahn, leaning on Tocqueville’s earlier work, reflects on the nature of volunteerism in loca...

Cities are unique spaces in need of constantly reconciling diversity and social cohesion also through legal/constitutional mechanisms. While academic scholarship in the social sciences has extensively studied cities from different angles, they remain a largely understudied topic among constitutional law and federalism theorists. Yet, urban agglomer...

Cities are unique spaces in need of constantly reconciling diversity and social cohesion also through legal/constitutional mechanisms. While academic scholarship in the social sciences has extensively studied cities from different angles, they remain a largely understudied topic among constitutional law and federalism theorists. Yet, urban agglomer...

This article reflects on subsidiarity as the preference for proximity. In doing so, it focuses both on the idea of the preference for proximity and the preference for proximity. The impetus for doing so is Nick Barber’s book The Principles of Constitutionalism, which counts subsidiarity as one of six principles that a constitution should embrace, a...

Ireland has enjoyed continuous democratic government for almost a century, an unusual experience among countries that gained their independence in the twentieth century. But the way this works has changed dramatically over time. Ireland’s colonial past has had an enduring influence over political life, enabling stable institutions of democratic acc...

Recent technological advances have made clear that law needs to take a stance in relation to freedom of thought. Although there is no formal recognition of freedom of thought in the text of the 1937 Constitution of Ireland, I will argue that such a right does exist in Irish law on the basis of both implicit and initial explicit recognition for free...

In many law schools around the world, the Socratic method is a cultural anathema and the Oxbridge tutorial system a financial impracticability: how then can these law schools, which adhere to the traditional lecture format nonetheless promote the dedicated teaching of legal reasoning? Seven years ago, a specific module dedicated to the development...

In the context of definitional confusion, it might seem recklessly counterproductive to suggest that what we agree on in relation to subsidiarity is perhaps more problematic than what we disagree on. Nonetheless, the purpose of this article is to challenge the uncontroversial startingpoint of much subsidiarity analysis: That subsidiarity allocates...

The chief problem with judicial activism is that it mandates judges operating beyond the boundaries of their limited constitutional mandate, thereby undermining the constitutional order. The corollary advantage of judicial restraint should be that it corrals the judiciary within the proper scope of its constitutional function and thereby upholds th...

Although our attraction to subsidiarity may often be little more than skin deep, this article proposes that there is a hidden intelligibility to the phenomenon of its gaining increasing attention and prestige. That intelligibility can be discerned through a consideration of the archetype of authority that subsidiarity proposes: embedded authority,...

It might seem counter-intuitive to suggest that the chasm between Europe and her citizens is partially caused by the weakening of constituent power at the national level. Nonetheless, this article contends that the strength of ever closer union depends partly on the resilience of national constituent power. An insight recovered from French constitu...

This chapter examines the constitutional conflict that occurs in the context of Ireland's rejection of the Lisbon Treaty. It begins by distinguishing the concepts "direct democracy" and "constitutional democracy" in order to clarify the importance of referenda if they are used as the constitutional amendability procedure in a functioning constituti...

The momentum behind the Constitutional Convention and the Constitutional Treaty was not that Brussels realised that the peoples of Europe were crying out for the drafting of a beautiful text, which they could take to their hearts as their very own constitution. That much, at least, has always been fairly clear. Of course, this should not present an...