Deirdre Ahern

Biography

Professor Deirdre Ahern is an Associate Professor in Trinity College Dublin's Law School where she is the Director of Teaching and Learning (Postgraduate). Her primary research areas are corporate law, comparative corporate law, corporate governance and commercial law. Professor Ahern's research agenda engages with the societal and legal expectations of companies and their directors including the ethical challenges presented by globalisation. She has written extensively nationally and internationally on the theoretical framework surrounding the duties of company directors. She has a track record of publishing cutting-edge transformative work in high impact, top tier national and international journals which is well cited in academic, policy, judicial and legal practice contexts. Based on a sustained research track of field-shaping work she has developed an international reputation as an expert on the law and policy relating to the duties of company directors and has broken new ground in how the discipline of corporate law and corporate governance is thought about. Her book, Directors' Duties; law and Practice (Thomson Roundhall, 2009) was shortlisted for the Kevin Boyle Prize. Professor Ahern was elected to Fellowship of Trinity College in 2012 on the basis of her contribution to scholarship and is an elected member of the Board (governing authority) of Trinity College representing the Fellows. A founding Director of the Irish Corporate Law Forum, Professor Ahern previously worked as a commercial solicitor with A&L Goodbody and KPMG and both as a researcher and principal officer with the Law Reform Commission. Professor Ahern is co-editor of the Irish Business Law Review and sits on the editorial boards of The Company Lawyer and the Journal of Business Law. She is a contributing editor to Gore-Browne on Companies. Deirdre has served as Secretary and President of the Irish Association of Law Teachers and is currently President of Trinity Women Graduates.

Research Interest

My research interests are corporate law (with a special focus on directors' duties) and corporate governance. I have supervised postgraduate research on company charges, board diversity, corporate governance of state-owned enterprises and corporate rescue. I have built an academic reputation in the field of corporate law and governance, and more particularly, as a specialist on the law relating to the duties of directors. This has been achieved by means of a sustained track of programmatic research on the legal duties of directors which has resulted in a series of specialist high quality research outputs in excellent academic journals. My book, Directors' Duties: Law and Practice (Thomson Round Hall, 2009) made a significant contribution by filling a substantial gap in scholarship and understanding of the law in this area. Collaborative research undertaken on listed companies' engagement with diversity was sponsored by the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation was innovative in how it examined impression management by companies in their annual reports concerning engagement with diversity. The findings of the multi-jurisdictional study were published in a working paper of the European Corporate Governance Institute. Current research work is focused on the challenges of measuring companies' commitment to corporate social responsibility as well as ongoing projects concerning the State's role in relation to ensuring gender balance in company leadership and a post-financial crisis review of directors' duties.