Dr. Donal Coffey

Affiliate Researcher

Main Focus

Donal Coffey is an Assistant Professor at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, where he lectures in constitutional law, administrative law and legal history. His research interests are in the fields of public law, comparative legal history and imperial legal history.

He completed his undergraduate studies and PhD in Ireland. He then taught in the United Kingdom at the Universities of Portsmouth and Surrey, before joining the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in 2016. In 2020, he returned to Ireland to take up his post at Maynooth.

His work on legal history looks at the development of imperial legal history in the first half of the 20th century, encompassing doctrinal, theoretical and intellectual arguments. It has been published in a number of leading journals, including the Journal of Legal History, Rechtsgeschichte – Legal History and the Law and History Review. His work on the legal history of public law looks mainly at comparative constitutional law and includes two monographs on Irish constitutional history.

Project

Curriculum Vitae

2020–
Assistant Professor, National University of Ireland, Maynooth.

2016–2020
Postdoctoral Researcher, Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, Frankfurt am Main, Department Vogenauer, ‘European and Comparative Legal History’

2015
Lecturer, University of Surrey, UK

2011–2015
Lecturer, University of Portsmouth, UK

2006–2010
PhD, University College Dublin (defended 2011)

2002–2006
LLB, Trinity College Dublin

Completed Project

Publications (selection)

Coffey, D.: The Drafting of the Constitution of the Union of Burma in 1947: Dominion Status, Indo–Burmese Relations, and the Irish Example. Law and History Review 41 (2), pp. 254 - 272 (2023)
Coffey, D.: Drafting the Irish Constitution, 1935–1937: Transnational Influences in Interwar Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham (2018), XIII, 312 pp.
Coffey, D.: Constitutionalism in Ireland, 1932–1938: National, Commonwealth, and International Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham (2018), xiii, 235 pp.

A full list of publications is available on Donal Coffey’s Maynooth University webpage.

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