John Edwards

Curriculum

Mr Justice Edwards is a graduate of University College Dublin, the Honourable Society of Kings Inns, Dublin and the University of Dublin, Trinity College. He graduated in 1981 with the degree of Bachelor in Civil Law, and became a Barrister at Law in 1983. Since then he has obtained several postgraduate qualifications including in European law, international commercial arbitration, and child law and child protection and welfare. He is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators. After 15 years in general legal practice as a junior counsel on Ireland’s south-western circuit he received a senior counsel’s patent of precedence in 1998 and was admitted to the inner bar. Thereafter, he specialised in criminal law, both prosecuting and defending, until his appointment as a judge of the High Court in 2007. While a judge of the High Court he sat in both civil and criminal cases, but was latterly in charge of that court’s extradition and European arrest warrant lists. In 2014 he was promoted to the Court of Appeal and he currently sits on the informal criminal division of that court. Since 2018 he has been on the Irish panel of ad hoc judges of the European Court of Human Rights. He is currently also an Adjunct Professor, and PhD candidate, in the School of Law at the University of Limerick. In addition, he is the President of the Association of Judges of Ireland.