Máiréad Enright is a feminist legal scholar working on issues including reproductive justice, law reform and grassroots organising, illegality in social movements, responses to historical injustice and the law on obstetric violence. Máiréad often works with and advises groups campaigning around reproductive rights and historical gender-based violence, especially in Ireland and Northern Ireland, and occasionally collaborates with artists interested in these issues. Previous work in this area was funded by a Leverhulme Fellowship.
From May 2025, she will be part of the team behind the Wellcome Discovery Award “Between Deception and Dissent: Regulating Unproven, Disproven and Misleading Health-Related Claims”. This collaborative project will explore how contested health-related claims are regulated in contemporary states; examine the socio-political implications of current strategies; and imagine and propose alternative legal models.
Before coming to Loughborough, Máiréad worked at the University of Birmingham and the University of Kent. She is a graduate of University College Cork, King’s College London and the King’s Inns, Dublin.
Máiréad’s work is interdisciplinary, drawing widely on perspectives from critical and political theory, history, gender studies and medical humanities. Her research interests include:
- Reproductive justice (particularly abortion, obstetric violence and access to contraception).
- Relationships between law and religion
- Gender and historical injustice (particularly ‘rescue homes’, coerced adoption and family separation)
- Law reform and social movements (particularly strategies around illegality and direct action).
- Feminist method and legal history.
- Artistic and prefigurative legal method.
Máiréad will be teaching Contract Law to first year undergraduates. She has written on feminist and decolonial approaches to contract law, and adopts similar perspectives in her teaching. Taking a ‘law in action’ approach, she encourages students to examine how contractual devices are used in practice across a range of social fields, how they have been understood in the past, and what they teach us about the common law’s ideal legal subjects.
- Enright, Máiréad. "Haunting reform: older women, English Good Shepherd institutions and the Children Act 1948." Contemporary British History (2025): 1-38.
- Enright, Máiréad. "“Up with the Brave”: Gender, Transgression and Judges’ Use of Catholic Convents in England and Ireland, 1930–1959." Law and History Review (2024): 1-25.
- Enright, Máiréad, and Deirdre Duffy. "Law and childbirth in Ireland after the 8th Amendment: notes on women's legal consciousness." Journal of Law and Society 49, no. 4 (2022): 753-777.
- Enright, Máiréad, and Sinéad Ring. "State legal responses to historical institutional abuse: Shame, sovereignty, and epistemic injustice." Éire-Ireland 55, no. 1 (2020): 68-99.
- Enright, Máiréad, Kathryn McNeilly, and Fiona De Londras. "Abortion activism, legal change, and taking feminist law work seriously." N. Ir. Legal Q. 71 (2020): 359.
- Enright, Máiréad. "Four pieces on Repeal: notes on art, aesthetics and the struggle against Ireland’s abortion law." Feminist Review 124, no. 1 (2020): 104-123.
- Enright, Máiréad, and Emilie Cloatre. "Transformative illegality: how condoms ‘became legal’in Ireland, 1991–1993." Feminist Legal Studies 26, no. 3 (2018): 261-284.
- Cloatre, Emilie, and Máiréad Enright. "‘On the perimeter of the lawful’: enduring illegality in the Irish family planning movement, 1972–1985." Journal of Law and Society 44, no. 4 (2017): 471-500.