Professor Stephen Tierney FBA

Summary

Stephen Tierney studied law at the universities of Glasgow, Liverpool, Edinburgh and Toronto. He is Professor of Constitutional Theory at Edinburgh University and Distinguished Global Professor of Law at Notre Dame Law School. As well as his academic work he has served as Legal Adviser to the House of Lords Constitution Committee since 2015 and was a judicial appointments commissioner in Scotland for nine years from 2015-24. In recognition of these roles he was appointed King’s Council honoris causa in 2024 and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2020. He has also practised law and appeared as part of an appellate team before the United Kingdom Supreme Court in 2025 in a landmark case on judicial independence.

His research interests lie in the constitutional theory of the state, focusing upon the functions constitutions perform in responding to changing political dynamics. In three monographs published by Oxford University Press over the past two decades he has applied constitutional theory to explore challenges posed to the contemporary polity by, respectively, nationalism, referendums and federalism. He has also published widely on the role of Parliament and its functions within the constitution of the United Kingdom, and was an editor of the UK Constitutional Law Blog from 2015-20.

In the course of his work he has been awarded Senior Research Fellowships by the British Academy/Leverhulme in 2008-09 (to study the constitutional and theoretical dimensions of direct democracy) and by the Economic and Social Research Council in 2013 (to address the legal challenges of devolution). He was also a member of research teams which won major grants from the ESRC in 2016 to examine the constitutional implications of Brexit and the Australian Research Council in 2022 for a project on constituent power and federalism.