Professor Dr. Delia Ferri
Maynooth University (Ireland)
Date: 03.09.2026, 12:30 p.m.
Venue: Room L619, 6th floor | Faculty of Law | Sigmund Freud University | Lassallestraße 3, 1020 Vienna
This presentation will examine the development of EU disability law through three interconnected dimensions: its intellectual foundations, its legal evolution, and the growing role of participation by persons with disabilities. It will begin by exploring the influence of the social model of disability, which challenged traditional medical understandings of disability. The presentation will consider how this shift informed the emergence of equality-based approaches and foregrounded the recognition of disability as a matter of rights, inclusion, and the removal of societal barriers. It will then examine how these developments were consolidated following the European Union’s ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). The second part of the presentation will analyse the transformative impact of the European Union’s ratification of the CRPD and reflect on how the Convention has influenced EU legislation, policy, and judicial interpretation, embedding disability rights more firmly within the EU legal order while highlighting both achievements and continuing challenges. Finally, the presentation will consider the increasing involvement of persons with disabilities and their representative organisations in shaping EU disability law and policy. It will assess the extent to which participatory approaches have strengthened the legitimacy and effectiveness of disability governance at the EU level.
Please register until 02.09.2026: konrad.lachmayer@jus.sfu.ac.at
Biography
Delia Ferri is Professor of Law at Maynooth University (MU) School of Law and Criminology, where she lectures primarily in the fields of EU law and International and European Disability Law. Until August 2025, she held the role of Director of the PhD Programs in Law. She is the co-Director of the MU Assisting Living & Learning (ALL) Institute, an interdisciplinary research institute, which includes more than 120 researchers and academics from across several MU Departments and Schools. Prof. Ferri is also affiliated researcher at the DIRPOLIS Institute (Institute of Law, Politics and Development) of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (Italy) within the research cluster on social rights, social inclusion and disability, and a fellow at the Burton Blatt Institute of Syracuse University (USA). In 2026, Prof. Ferri has been elected as member of the Royal Irish Academy, which is the highest academic honour in Ireland. She is a senior member of the European Disability Expertise network funded by the European Commission. Since June 2023, she is a member of the Scientific Committee of the Fundamental Rights Agency of the European Union. She holds an array of other honorary positions as member of advisory boards in projects and academic programmes, as well as editorial boards of academic journals. Among other, in 2020, she was Visiting Professor at the Interamerican Academy of Human Rights of the Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila (Mexico). She has acted as PhD External Examiner at Universities in Australia, Ireland, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom. Prof. Ferri has authored several academic publications focusing on the rights of people with disabilities, participatory processes, cultural policies and cultural diversity. She has published in highly reputed peer-reviewed legal journals including European Constitutional Law Review, European Law Journal, European Law Review and Journal of Human Rights Practice, and several of her articles feature in top-quartile (Q1) journals according to the SCImago Journal Rank, reflecting the quality and visibility of her work. Further, Prof. Ferri has been awarded several major grants and seed funding, including a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator grant for the project entitled Protecting the Right to Culture of Persons with Disabilities and Enhancing Cultural Diversity through European Union Law: Exploring New Paths (DANCING) of Eur 2 million. To date, the external funding awarded to Prof Ferri as PI or Co-PI is approximately Eur 3 million. Besides her academic endeavours, Prof. Ferri is a widely recognized expert on disability law and policy and taken part in several projects and EU-funded policy studies for EU institutions, including the European Parliament and the European Commission, and other international organizations, such as the Council of Europe.
The Discussion Group on Comparative Constitutional Law and Theory is organised by Prof. Konrad Lachmayer and Dr. Andreas Orator at the Sigmund Freud Private University, Faculty of Law, in Vienna.