Fionnuala Ní Aoláin

Fionnuala Ní Aoláin (Irish pronunciation: [ˈfʲɪn̪ˠuəl̪ˠə nʲiː ˈiːl̪ˠaːnʲ]; born Galway, 1967) is an Irish academic lawyer specialising in human rights law.

Career

Ní Aoláin graduated from Queen's University, Belfast (LLB 1990, PhD 1998), and Columbia Law School (LLM 1996).

She was a Visiting Fellow of Harvard Law School's Human Rights Program in 1994. At Columbia University she was an Associate-in-Law at Columbia Law School from 1994–96, and then a Visiting Professor at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University from 1996–2000.

She was appointed Associate Professor of Law at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel from 1997–99. Returning to the United States in 2001, she was a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University from 2001–02, at University of Minnesota Law School from 2003–04, then returned to Harvard Law School as Visiting Professor from 2012-2013.

Ní Aoláin was appointed by the Government of Ireland in December 2000 as a member of the Irish Human Rights Commission, for which creation was mandated by the Good Friday Agreement. She was a consultant to the UN Women and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights's Study on Reparations for Conflict Related Sexual Violence, 2011-2012. She is the Chair of the Board of the Open Society Foundations International Women's Program, and was Co-Chair of the Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law 2014, with Hathaway and Johnson.

She was an executive member of the American Society of International Law from 2009-2012, and of the Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ), in Northern Ireland. She is a member of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, and was appointed by the Secretary-General of the United Nations as Special Expert on promoting gender equality in times of conflict and peace-making in 2003.

She was nominated by the Irish government in 2004 to the European Court of Human Rights, and was both the first woman and the first academic lawyer to be nominated.

She is concurrently professor of law at the University of Ulster, in Northern Ireland, where she teaches international law and international human rights law. She is the founder and currently associate director of the Transitional Justice Institute, and the Dorsey and Whitney Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School. She is married to Oren Gross, Irving Younger professor of law at University of Minnesota Law School; they have three children: Aodhtan, Noa, and Malachi.

In 2015 Just Security described her as concurrently serving as the Dorsey and Whitney Chair in Law at the University of Minnesota Law School and as a Professor of Law at the University of Ulster.^[1]

Books

• Ní Aoláin, The Politics of Force – Conflict Management and State Violence in Northern Ireland (Blackstaff Press) (2000), ISBN 978-0856406683
• Ní Aoláin & Gross, Law in Times of Crisis – Emergency Powers in Theory and Practice (Cambridge University Press) (2006), ISBN 978-0521833516. This book was awarded the American Society of International Law's Certificate of Merit for its contribution to creative scholarship.^[2]
• Weissbrodt, Ní Aoláin, Fitzpartick, and Nueman, International Human Rights: Law, Policy and Process (2009) (Lexis Pub, 4th ed.) (2009), ISBN 978-1422411735
• Ní Aoláin, Weissbrodt, Rumsey & Others, Selected International Human Rights Instruments and Bibliography for Research on International Human Rights (LexisNexis, 4th ed.) (2009), ISBN 978-1422411742
• Ni Aoláin, Fionnuala, Hayes & Cahn, On the Frontlines: Women, War and the Post-Conflict Process (2011) (Oxford University Press), ISBN 9780195396652
• Ní Aoláin & Weissbrodt, Development of International Human Rights Law (2013), ISBN 978-1409441298 (Ashgate)
• Ni Aoláin (ed.), Gross (ed.), Guantánamo and Beyond: Exceptional Courts and Military Commissions in Comparative Perspective, (Cambridge University Press), (2013), ISBN 978-1107631717

Awards and recognition

• Ní Aoláin was the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, the Alon Prize, a Robert Schumann Scholarship, and a Lawlor Fellowship.

References