Deirdre Curtin
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Professor Dr Deirdre M. Curtin (17 January 1960, Dublin, Ireland) studied law at University College Dublin and Trinity College, Dublin. At the age of just 32, Curtin was appointed as professor of Law of International Organisations at the Faculty of Law and director of the Europa Institute at Utrecht University. In 2003, she moved to the professorship of International and European Governance and the multidisciplinary Utrecht School of Governance. Additionally for many years she was visiting professor at the College of Europe in Bruges and she is currently associated with the Centre for European Law at the University of Cambridge. She was the first woman to be appointed a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in the section law. In 2007, she won the Spinozapremie.
Deirdre Curtin is a leading expert in the area of law and governance of the European Union. Her specialist fields are international law and international governance. She studies phenomena such as democracy, legitimacy and accountability in a groundbreaking manner. She has further developed the term accountability into a phenomenon that can be empirically investigated, and demonstrated how the EU suffers from shortcomings in accountability. She also draws upon public administration concepts in her analyses, which led amongst other things to important, innovative insights into the governability of international organisations.
Curtin exerts an enormous influence on her research field and is a highly sought after speaker as well as a member of numerous national and international advisory committees. Her article about the constitutional structure of the European Union published in 1993 is still one of the most cited articles about the European Union. She has exerted a considerable influence on the European legislation (2001) granting public access to documents of certain European institutions, for which she wrote part of the draft. Her multidisciplinary view on the EU as a political and administrative entity has clearly shaped the current debate about the EU.
Deirdre Curtin is the author of a large number of publications in the foremost international journals and handbooks. Deirdre Curtin is a first-rate and leading player in the field of European law. With considerable charisma, she knows how to promote her ideas. Long before anyone else she warned of the insidious growth in the number of independent governing bodies that threaten to become a wide-ranging and unwieldy European administrative apparatus.
