Dr Norah Burns is a Senior Lecturer in the Law School. She holds an LLB in Law, an LLM in Human Rights in Criminal Justice and a PhD in Law. She has also completed a Master of Arts in Third Level Teaching Learning and Scholarship. Her interests include: legal education, women and the law, minority rights and equality. She has previously taught at the School of Law at Trinity College Dublin, where she completed her doctoral studies.

She is a multi-award winning (regional, national and international) lecturer. In 2025 she was chosen by law students at QUB as the Excellence in Interdisciplinary Lecturing category winner in the QUB Law School Teaching Awards. In 2024 she was a finalist in the Oxford University Press Law Teacher of the Year competition. In 2023 she and the Student Skills Assistants team in the Law School were awarded the best teamwork award in the QUB AHSS Digital Teaching Awards. In 2021 she was named as a National Teaching Hero by the Union of Students in Ireland and the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.

She has extensive experience of high level leadership having been appointed as the Irish Minister for Higher Educations Ministerial Nominee to the governing body of Ireland's first technological university. She was first appointed in 2021. She serves on the Universities Equality, Diversity and Inclusion subcommittee. She was elected to the board of the National Women's Council in November 2020. The NWC is the foremost body working on equality for women and girls and represents over 300,000 women and nearly 200 groups. She has been re-elected as a board member by the membership on two further occasions. In April 2021 she was appointed by the Irish Minister for Equality, Children and Disability to the Council of Gaisce, the President of Ireland's youth leadership award. She has been re-appointed for a second term and serves on the governance sub-committee and the joint award committee (focusing on the joint award initiative between Gaisce and the Duke of Edinburgh Award NI in Northern Ireland).

Dr Burns has extensive consultancy and external recruitment experience. She has been involved in the recruitment and selection process for several senior university leadership roles such as: University President/Vice Chancellor, senior University executive and external members of governing body. She has engaged with government departments, funding organisations, education authorities and stakeholders. She has also served as an international legal education expert for the purpose of QQI programme validation and re-validation. In October 2020 she was named by the Asia Europe Foundation as a Future Young Ethical Leader in Europe and attended the ASEM (Asia – Europe Meeting) for 51 Heads of State that year in Brussels. She was also invited to speak about her work with the King and Queen of the Belgians at the Castle of Laeken during the visit. In 2023 she was a finalist in the AHSS Digital Teaching and Learning Awards Leadership and Innovation award category for her leadership of the Law Student Skills Assistants Programme. In 2024 she was a finalist in the QUB Staff Excellence Awards for Outstanding Leadership.

In 2024 she founded the Legal Education Cluster within the Law School, the Cluster now has over thirty members, consisting of academic and professional services staff and PhD students. She has been a Council member of the Irish Association of Law Teachers since 2021 and in 2024 was part of a four person group of academics in the Law School that was awarded funding to host the Association of Law Teachers Annual Seminar, this took the form of a two day conference in Belfast in June 2024. She has been a committee member of the Trinity College Dublin School of Law Irish Supreme Court Review since 2021. She was an external examiner for law at South East Technological University for a four year term. She was an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the School of Law at Trinity College Dublin from 2019 to 2022.

Since 2022 she has been invited by the Irish Chief Justice to select a Queens University Law student to attend the Chief Justice's Summer Placement Programme. The Programme for law students is an annual month-long programme which gives third level law students the opportunity to shadow a judge of the Supreme Court, Court of Appeal or High Court. The QUB student joins students from Fordham University School of Law, New York, the University of Missouri, Kansas City and Bangor University, Wales on the programme.

Dr Burns was the Student Experience Co-Ordinator in the Law School between September 2022 and July 2025. She was the inaugural Director of the award winning Law Student Skills Assistants Programme from November 2021 to July 2025. She led a team of over twenty Law SSAs over that time who worked to embed legal skills and community building activities within the Law School for undergraduate students. She led the peer mentoring programme between 2021 and July 2025, expanding the programme beyond first years to include international undergraduate students who join the Law School during their second or third year of their degree. Dr Burns has been the staff liaison point for the Women in Law student society since Spring 2022 and has also supported the creation of four additional student societies in the Law School during her time as Student Experience Co-Ordinator. She also sat on the School’s Academic Offences Committee between 2021 and 2024. She is also a member of the School's AI Working Group.

I am interested in supervising PhD projects in the areas of: European human rights, equality, women and the law and legal education.