Fionnuala D. Ní Aoláin

Dorsey & Whitney Chair in Law

Fionnuala D. Ni Aoláin

344 Mondale Hall
229–19th Ave. South
Minneapolis, MN 55455

612-624-2318

612-625-2011

niaol002@umn.edu

Queen's University Law Faculty, Belfast, Northern Ireland, LL.B., Ph.D.
Columbia Law School, LL.M.

Professor Fionnuala D. Ní Aoláin is concurrently the Dorsey & Whitney Chair in Law at the University of Minnesota Law School and a Professor of Law at the University of Ulster's Transitional Justice Institute in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She is co-founder and Associate Director of the Institute. Professor Ní Aoláin received her LL.B. and Ph.D. in law at the Queen's University Law Faculty in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She also holds an LL.M. degree from Columbia Law School. Professor Ní Aoláin was a Visiting Professor at the University of Minnesota Law School in 2003-04.

She has previously been Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School (1993-94); Associate-in-Law at Columbia Law School (1994-96); Visiting Professor at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University (1996-2000); Associate Professor of Law at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel (1997-99) and Visiting Fellow at Princeton University (2001-02). Professor Ní Aoláin is the recipient of numerous academic awards and honors, including a Fulbright scholarship, the Alon Prize, the Robert Schumann Scholarship, a European Commission award, and the Lawlor fellowship.

Her teaching and research interests are in the fields of international law, human rights law, national security law, and feminist legal theory. She has published extensively in the fields of emergency powers, conflict regulation, transitional justice, and sex-based violence in times of war. Her most recent book, Law in Times of Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2006), was awarded the American Society of International Law's preeminent prize in 2007: the Certificate of Merit for creative scholarship. She was a representative of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at domestic war crimes trials in Bosnia (1996-97). In 2003, she was appointed by the Secretary-General of the United Nations as Special Expert on promoting gender equality in times of conflict and peace-making.

She has been nominated twice by the Irish government to the European Court of Human Rights, in 2004 and 2007, the first woman and the first academic lawyer to be thus nominated. She was appointed by the Irish Minister of Justice to the Irish Human Rights Commission in 2000 and served until 2005. She remains an elected member of the Executive Committee for the Belfast-based Committee on the Administration of Justice, and is also a member of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties.