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Suzanne Kingston

Suzanne is a graduate of Oxford University (BA in Law) and the University of Leiden, the Netherlands (LL.M. in European Community Law, Ph.D.).  She served as a référendaire (legal adviser) in the cabinet of Advocate General Geelhoed at the European Court of Justice, Luxembourg from 2004-2006.  Prior to this, she practised EU law at the Brussels office of the US law firm, Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton (2002-2004) and was a stagiaire at the European Commission (DG Competition)(2001-2002). In Spring 2014, Suzanne was international visiting professor of law at Columbia Law School, New York, where she is also be adjunct professor in 2015.

Previously, she has been a visiting lecturer at Cambridge University, the University of Leiden, Queen’s University, Belfast, and Osgoode Hall Law School, Toronto. Suzanne is a principal investigator at UCD’s Earth Institute and a committee member of the Irish Society of European Law.  She is a barrister practising at the Irish bar and regularly appears before the Irish and European courts. Suzanne’s research focuses primarily on EU law and policy and its interplay with national and international law.  To date, her research has centred on:

  • Competition law and policy, including EU, national, international and comparative competition law
  • Environmental law and policy, including EU, national and international environmental law
  • EU economic law, particularly EU internal market and taxation law
  • EU human rights law
  • The role of the EU courts

She has a particular interest in interdisciplinary approaches, especially law/economics, law/political theory, and (especially in the environmental law context) law/science.  Suzanne has published widely in the field of European law and governance, especially in the environmental, competition and economic, and human rights fields.  She has a special interest in how tensions between the EU’s economic and non-economic aims play out in European law and governance.     

In December 2014, Suzanne was awarded a research grant of almost 1.5 million euro from the EU’s European Research Council for this project investigating how the way we design our laws influences levels of environmental compliance in the EU. In 2012, 2014 and 2015 she led EU-funded seminars in advanced EU competition law for judges from across Europe, the first time that such events had ever taken place in Ireland.