ESC & YLS Colloquium Series

Síofra O'Leary is a former Judge and President of the European Court of Human Rights (2015 – 2024). She was elected as the Judge in respect of Ireland in 2015 and since 2020 served as the President of Section V, as Vice-President and as the Court’s 17th President, the first woman to have performed this role in the Court’s history. 

Prior to joining the European Court of Human Rights, Judge O’Leary worked for almost two decades at the Court of Justice of the European Union in both judicial and administrative capacities. 

In parallel to her work at both European courts, Judge O’Leary is a Visiting Professor at the College of Europe in Bruges where she has taught LLM courses on EU law and the individual, EU Social Law and Policy, as well as participating in an annual judicial workshop. She has also served on the Editorial Board of the Common Market Law Review and is now a member of both its Advisory Board and the Board of the Irish Centre for European Law. She is a member of the Society of Legal Scholars and of the editorial board of several national and European periodicals. She is Honorary Bencher of the Honorable Society of King’s Inns, Dublin, and of Lincoln’s Inn, London, as well as an Honorary Fellow of Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge. In 2024 she received an LLD h.c. from the University of Edinburgh and in December 2024 University College Dublin will confer on her the Ulysses Medal in recognition of her legal work and European service.  

A graduate of University College Dublin (BCL) and a postgraduate of the European University Institute (PhD), Judge O’Leary was previously the Assistant Director for the Centre of European Legal Studies at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Emmanuel College, a Visiting Fellow at the Faculty of Law, University College Dublin, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cádiz, Spain and a Research Associate at the Institute for Public Policy Research in London. 

Judge O’Leary is the author of two books entitled The Evolving Concept of Community Citizenship (Kluwer, 1996) and Employment Law at the European Court of Justice (Hart Publishing, 2001) and has published numerous articles in academic journals and legal monographs on the protection of fundamental rights in EU law and under the ECHR, EU employment law, the free movement of persons and services and EU citizenship generally. 

Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. He received a doctorate in modern European history from the University of California-Berkeley in 2000 and a law degree from Harvard University in 2001. He came to Yale from Harvard University, where he was Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor of Law and Professor of History. Before this, he spent 13 years in the Columbia University history department, where he was most recently James Bryce Professor of European Legal History. His areas of interest in legal scholarship include international law, human rights, the law of war, and legal thought, in both historical and current perspective. In intellectual history, he has worked on a diverse range of subjects, especially twentieth-century European moral and political theory.

Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine administered an unprecedented shock to the European and global energy markets, triggering emergency interventions and market reforms to limit the impact of the crisis on energy prices and supply security. More fundamentally, the supply shock sparked a profound reappraisal of foreign supply and infrastructure dependencies (for example, on China), leading states to adopt new legal initiatives to strengthen the resilience of their clean energy supply chains. Energy geopolitics and supply security are now firmly back at the centre of global energy policy, and in this new geopolitical reality, we critically need to reassess the role of energy law in the creation - and avoidance - of dangerous energy dependencies. In this panel, the speakers and discussant will focus their intervention on the role of the European Union in light of the Russo-Ukrainian crisis, with a special focus on the dependencies on the energy sector and the connections between natural resources and political development.

Isabela Mares is the Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science and the Director of the European Union Center at Yale. She specializes in the comparative politics of Europe. Professor Mares has written extensively on labor market and social policy reforms, the political economy of taxation, electoral clientelism, reforms limiting electoral corruption. Her current research examines the political responses to antiparliamentarism in both contemporary and historical settings.

Professor Mares is the author of five books. These include The Politics of Social Risk: Business and Welfare State Development (New York: Cambridge University Press 2003), Taxation, Wage Bargaining and Unemployment (New York: Cambridge University Press 2006), From Open Secrets to Secret Voting (New York: Cambridge University Press 2015), Conditionality and Coercion: Electoral clientelism in Eastern Europe (co-authored with Lauren Young, Oxford University Press 2018) and Protecting the Ballot: How First Wave Democracies Ended Electoral Corruption (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2022).

The Politics of Social Risk was awarded the Gregory Luebbert best book in comparative politics award by the American Political Science Association and the best book in European Politics by the Council for European Studies. Conditionality and Coercion was awarded the William Riker award for Best Book in Political Economy by the American Political Science Association, the Best book in European Politics and was a runner up for the Gregory Luebbert Award. Her articles have been awarded best prizes by the APSA sections on Comparative Politics, Representation and Electoral Systems and History and Politics, among others.  Professor Mares is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the Simon Guggenheim Foundation.