Colin Scott serves as Registrar, Deputy President and Vice President for Academic Affairs University College Dublin. Previously, he was the Vice President for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, Principal of UCD College of Social Sciences and Law, and Dean of Social Sciences and Dean of Law.

Research Interests

His research interests focus centrally on the trends of and implications from the fragmentation of regulatory governance. He has more than 100 publications in books, edited books, articles and book chapters with leading journals and presses.

Research Projects

Colin’s major collaborative research projects have included an innovative interdisciplinary study of the regulation of the public sector (UK Economic and Social Research Council), an ethnographic study of UK telecommunications regulation (Leverhulme Trust), and a study of the development of meta-regulation (Australian Research Council). It also comprises of a comparative study of liability regulation in local government (ESRC and Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences), a project to build and deploy a database of all central state agencies in Ireland (IRCHSS), and a study of the development of reflexive modes of governance (EU Framework Programme 6). Lastly, his research projects also include a multi-sector study of the growth of transnational private regulation (Hague Institute for Internationalisation of Law) and a study of regulation in Ireland (IRCHSS and Institute for Public Administration).

Affiliations

Between 2011 and 2014, Colin Scott was Dean of Law at UCD and Associate Dean of the UCD School of Law. Before that, between 2006-2009, he was vice principal for Research and Innovation for the UCD College of Business and Law and a professor at the College of Europe, in Bruges, where he taught on the interdisciplinary masters on European Law and Economic Analysis (ELEA). Colin Scott gave his inaugural lecture, ‘Regulating Everything’ in February 2008. Prior to his appointment at UCD, in April 2006, he lectured at the London School of Economics (1992-2006) and at the University of Warwick (1989-1991).

Colin Scott is a co-author of the Irish State Administration Database (2010-). He has also been convenor of the ECPR Standing Group on Regulatory Governance 2016-2021, and chair of the Biennial Regulatory Governance Conference, ‘Regulation in the Age of Crisis’, held in Dublin in June 2010. Prior to that, he has been director of the UCD Centre for Regulation and Governance, in 2010-2013. From 2000-2010, he was working as a research associate of the ESRC Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Regulation (CARR), based at the London School of Economics.

He was appointed to the Irish Research Council in 2021 and to the editorial board of The Conversation UK in 2017. Before that, he was a member of the Board of Institute for Public Administration, in 2014-2016. He has previously had editorial roles with Legal Studies (2011-2016), Law & Policy (2006-2011), and the Modern Law Review (1994-2007).

He studied at the London School of Economics and at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto.

He is married with two children.

Publications

  • Schmidt, R., & Scott, C. (2021). Regulatory discretion: structuring power in the era of regulatory capitalism. Legal Studies, 41(3), 454-473.
  • Hardiman, N., Farrell, D. M., Carolan, E., Coakley, J., Regan, A., Scott, C., … & Zellentin, A. (2021). What Kind of Ireland?. The Oxford Handbook of Irish Politics, 1.
  • Scott, C. (2021), “Managing higher education for a changing regulatory environment”, Public Administration and Policy: An Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 24 No. 1, pp. 7-20. https://doi.org/10.1108/PAP-10-2020-0045
  • Scott, C. (2021). The Politics of Regulation in Ireland. In Farrell, D., Hardiman, N.(eds.). Oxford Handbook of Irish Politics. Oxford University Press.
  • Scott, C. (2020). Implementation: facilitating and overseeing public services at street level. In Cane P., Lindseth P., Ip, E., Hoffman H.(eds.). Oxford Handbook of Comparative Administrative Law. Oxford University Press.
  • Scott, C. (2020). Managing and regulating commitments to equality, diversity and inclusion in higher education. Irish Educational Studies, 39(2), 175-191.
  • Scott, C. (2019). The Democratic Challenges of Effective Private Regulation and Enforcement. In Senden L., de Cock Buning M.(eds.). Private Regulation and Enforcement in the EU: Finding the Right Balance from a Citizen’s Perspective. Hart Publishing.

You can see his full Google Scholar Profile here.

Contact: colin.scott@ucd.ie

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