John Cotter

Biography

John Cotter BCL, LLB (Hons) (NUI), BL (King's Inns), Barrister (unregistered) (Middle Temple), PhD (Dubl), FHEA joined Keele University as a Lecturer in Law in 2019, before being promoted to Senior Lecturer in Law in 2023. Prior to joining Keele University, John was a lecturer at the Department of International and European Law, Faculty of Law at Maastricht University, the Netherlands and a lecturer at Hasselt University, Belgium (2017-2019). Before that, he was a senior lecturer in law at the University of Wolverhampton. He holds BCL (Law and German) and LLB degrees from University College Cork, Ireland and a PhD in law from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. He is qualified as a barrister in Ireland and in England & Wales, and practised at the Irish bar for four years (2007-2011).

Research and scholarship

John’s research areas are European Union constitutional and institutional law, with specific interests in impeachment processes and European Union responses to democratic backsliding in its Member States. He is author of Legal Certainty in the Preliminary Reference Procedure: The Role of Extra-Legal Steadying Factors (Elgar, 2022) and has had articles published in journals such as the Cambridge Yearbook of European Legal Studies, the Common Market Law Review, the European Law Review, European Public Law, European Papers, and the Journal of Common Market Studies.

Teaching

Undergraduate

• Public Law
• European Union Law

Further information

John would welcome the opportunity to supervise PhD theses in the areas of European Union institutional and procedural law.