Professor David Kenny

Biography

Professor David Kenny is Professor in Law at the Law School, teaching and researching Irish and comparative constitutional law, conflict of laws, critical legal theory and law and literature. He is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, Harvard Law School, and the Honourable Society of the King's Inns, and is an alumnus of the US State Department's Fulbright programme. He was elected a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin in 2021. In 2024 and 2025, he served as Head of the Law School. Professor Kenny's research specialises in Irish and comparative constitutional law. He is co-author of the 5th edition of Kelly: the Irish Constitution, the leading text on Irish Constitutional Law, as well as many peer-reviewed articles in leading national and international journals on topics such as proportionality, constitutional culture, referendums, and executive branch legal advisors. He also researches widely in the field of law and literature. He has recently published a book with Routledge drawing together law, literature, and philosophical pragmatism entitled 'Pragmatism, Law and Literature'. Professor Kenny has worked on constitutional reform issues across the island of Ireland. He has given expert evidence on constitutional issues to the Citizen's Assembly, the Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Eighth Amendment, the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Justice and Defence, and the Oireachtas Special Covid-19 Committee. He was a member of the Working Group on Unification Referendums on the Island of Ireland which reported in 2021, convened by the Constitution Unit of University College London and supported by funding from the British Academy and the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. He was a co-ordinator of NSLMap, a recently-concluded project funded by the Shared Island Unit and Irish Research Council to map the convergences and divergences in various areas of law between Ireland and Northern Ireland. He served as a facilitator for the Northern Ireland Assembly Ad Hoc Committee on a Bill of Rights for Northern Ireland. He co-authored a major report on the human rights impact of COVID-19 response measures for the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission in 2021. He also, from 2020-2023, worked with the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission to develop a policy on constitutional change in respect of Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. He is currently a member of the Research Advisory Group of An Coimisiún Toghcháin/The Electoral Commission. Farther afield, he worked with the Centre of Constitutional Democracy at IU Bloomington and the US National Committee on North Korea in 2021 to compile a report on constitutionalism on the Korean Peninsula. He has advised the Commission on the Constitution of the National Diet of Japan about matters related to referendums. In August 2023 served as a human rights/rule of law consultant and training expert for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe in Ukraine. Since March 2024, he has served as an external expert for the appointments process for the Constitutional Court of Ukraine, setting written competence assessments in constitutional law for candidates being considered for appointment to the Court. He recently engaged with various stakeholders and International IDEA on reform of the Senate of Thailand. He currently serves as a Senior Distinguished Research Fellow at the Constitution Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin, and as a Senior Fellow at Melbourne Law School. Professor Kenny teaches constitutional law, critical legal theory, private international law, and law & literature. He was a recipient of the Provost's Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2015.