Dr. Brian Barry

Biography

Dr. Brian Barry is Associate Professor in the School of Law. He teaches teaches and supervises dissertations in the areas of AI regulation and AI for law at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

Dr. Barry's research is primarily concerned with understanding and improving decision-making in justice systems. His research is empirically-focused and interdisciplinary, linking areas such as the psychology of judicial decision-making, the operation of courts, and technologies for judging, particularly AI tools and systems. He is also interested in judicial education and training, and dispute resolution more broadly.

He was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant (value €2 million) in 2025 for JUDGEASSIST, a project to investigate the appropriate and principled development of AI for assisting judicial decision-making.

He is the author of How Judges Judge: Empirical Insights into Judicial Decision-Making (Informa Law from Routledge, 2021) and of numerous peer-reviewed articles and other published works. His research has attracted large-scale funding and has been cited by leading courts such as the Irish Supreme Court and the Australian Federal Court. Dr. Barry has advised several government departments and agencies on improving decision-making in their operations, and he regularly delivers training to judges and adjudicators at various judicial and quasi-judicial bodies, particularly on the psychology of judicial decision-making.

Before joining the School of Law as an associate professor, Dr. Barry lectured in law at Technological University Dublin. He graduated from the School of Law with an LL.B. in 2009 and a Ph.D. in 2013 for his thesis on workplace dispute resolution reform in Ireland. He was a visiting scholar at Columbia University and the University of Toronto, and qualified and practised as a solicitor in a large Dublin law firm for some time.