Conor Hanly B.A., LL.B., LL.M. (NUI), LL.M., J.S.D. (Yale)

Conor Hanly graduated from University of Galway with a B.A. in History and Legal Science in 1988 and an LL.B. in 1990. In 1994, he completed an LL.M. by research at University College Dublin entitled Pricing: A Behavioural Approach to Abuses of Market Power, for which he was awarded First Class Honours.

Conor spent five years working in civil litigation in the Claims Department of Eagle Star Insurance Company. From 1995 to 2000, he was Lecturer in Law at Waterford Institute of Technology and served as an adviser to the Doras project, an outreach programme for those involved in juvenile prostitution in Waterford City. He joined the faculty at University of Galway in 2000.

From 2003 to 2004, Conor was a Graduate Fellow at Yale Law School, where he was conferred with a Master of Laws degree and awarded the Joseph M. Parker Prize in Legal History and Roman Law for his paper The Decline of the Civil Jury in Nineteenth-Century England. He was also an editor of the Yale Law and Policy Review. In 2012, he completed his doctorate (J.S.D.) on the criminal jury in Victorian England.

From 2013 to 2018, Conor served as Director of Internationalisation for the Law School and Director of the LL.B. programme. During this period, he was also a member of the Learning, Teaching and Assessment Committee and the Law School Executive Committee. Since 2018, he has been Director of Marketing for the School and Class Adviser to second-year BCL students.

He has acted as external examiner for Trinity College Dublin, the University of Limerick, and Athlone, Carlow, and Waterford Institutes of Technology. Conor is a regular contributor to local, regional, and national print and electronic media on matters of criminal law, particularly those relating to sexual offences.

Conor has a particular interest in domestic and sexual violence. He was principal investigator for a ground-breaking study of attrition in rape cases published in 2009 (Rape and Justice in Ireland). In 2016, he was principal investigator and co-author of a major study of domestic violence in Ireland (In Search of Justice: Women and the Irish Legal System).

In 2018, Conor joined the Board of the Galway Rape Crisis Centre and has served as Secretary to the Board since 2022. He runs a free legal information service for clients of the Centre. In 2019, the Central Statistics Office appointed Conor to the Data Expert Group for the CSO’s Sexual Violence Survey 2023. In April 2024, the Minister for Justice appointed Conor to the Board of CUAN, the statutory Domestic, Sexual and Gender-Based Violence Agency.

Conor's undergraduate teaching interests are primarily in the field of criminal law. He also teaches a first-year module on Legal Procedure which includes a mandatory moot element. For several years, he also ran the Moot Court module, and continues to mentor moot teams. At postgraduate level, Conor teaches a module on the criminal jury.