Seán Patrick Donlan

Professor

JD (Louisiana), PhD (Trinity College Dublin)

Professor Donlan previously worked at the University of Limerick (Ireland, 2002-2015) and the University of the South Pacific (Vanuatu and Fiji, 2016-2018). He’s also taught in programs in Canada, France, Ireland, Italy, and Malta. He served as TRU Law’s Associate Dean from 2018-2022.

Professor Donlan was a founding member of the European Society for Comparative Legal History, the Irish Society of Comparative Law, and Juris Diversitas. He was active in the Irish Legal History Society, the Eighteenth-century Ireland Society/Cumann Éire san Ochtú Céad Déag, and the World Society for Mixed Jurisdiction Jurists. He's also an elected Associate Member of the International Academy of Comparative Law, President Emeritus of Juris Diversitas, and a member of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History and the Canadian Association for Irish Studies.

Professor Donlan's research interests include legal history, comparative law, legal theory, film, and Irish history and politics. He’s written on these topics, especially on comparative legal history, mixed legal traditions, Edmund Burke (c1730-1797), and Irish history. He created and edited Comparative Legal History (2013-2016) and the Juris Diversitas Book Series (2013-2015).

Professor Donlan's latest publication is A companion to Western legal traditions: from antiquity to the twentieth century (2023, edited, with RH van Rhee, A Masferrer, and C Heesters). Other edited publications include:

• Comparative law: mixes, movements, and metaphors 2020, with J Mair)
• Legal traditions in Louisiana and the Floridas, 1763-1848 (2019, with V Palmer)
• The law's many bodies: studies in legal hybridity and jurisdictional complexity, c1600-1900 (2015, with D Heirbaut)
• A study of mixed legal systems: endangered, entrenched, or blended (2014, with E Örücü and S Farran)
• Concepts of law: comparative, jurisprudential, and social science perspectives (2014, with L Heckendorn Urscheler)
• The law and other legalities of Ireland, 1689-1850 (2011, with M Brown)
• Comparative law and hybrid legal traditions (2010, with E Cashin-Ritaine and M Sychold)
• Edmund Burke's Irish identities (2006)
• Francis Stoughton Sullivan, Lectures on the constitution and laws of England (2004 reprint of second edition 1776)

Other publications have appeared in numerous edited collections and in, among others, the Comparative Law Review, the Dublin University Law Journal (ns), Eighteenth-Century Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr, the Irish Jurist (ns), the Journal of Civil Law Studies, the Journal of Comparative Law, the Judicial Studies Institute Journal (Ireland), the Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly, Studies in Burke and His Time (ns), and the Tulane European and Civil Law Forum.

Contact

Office: OM 4761
Email:
sdonlan@tru.ca
Phone:
778-471-8369