Stephen Tierney KC (Hon) FRSE
Professor of Constitutional Theory
Tel: +44 (0)131-650-2070
Email: s.tierney@ed.ac.uk
View my publicationsStephen Tierney is Professor of Constitutional Theory. He served as Deputy Head of Edinburgh Law School from 2017-2020 and was the founding Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Constitutional Law. He is also Distinguished Global Professor of Law, Notre Dame Law School, USA.
Professor Tierney was appointed Honorary King’s Counsel in 2024 and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2020. He has served as Legal Adviser to the House of Lords Constitution Committee since 2015 and was a Board Member of the Judicial Appointments Board for Scotland from 2015-24. He was elected to the Executive Committee of the UK Constitutional Law Association in 2015 and served as an editor of the United Kingdom Constitutional Law blog from 2015-2020. He also acted as Constitutional Adviser to the Scottish Parliament Referendum Bill Committee in 2013-14.
Professor Tierney’s teaching and research interests lie in the constitutional law of the United Kingdom, comparative constitutional law and the constitutional theory of the state, direct democracy and federalism.
He has published three monographs with Oxford University Press: Constitutional Law and National Pluralism (2004) and Constitutional Referendums: The Theory and Practice of Republican Deliberation (2012), and The Federal Contract: A Constitutional Theory of Federalism (2022). He has published nine other books and over 80 refereed journal articles and book contributions, including papers in the International Journal of Constitutional Law, Modern Law Review, Public Law, Current Legal Problems, European Constitutional Law Review, Global Constitutionalism and the Supreme Court Law Review.
Professor Tierney has been awarded Senior Research Fellowships by both the British Academy and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). In 2018 he won an ESRC Brexit Priority grant with two colleagues to study ‘The repatriation of competences after Brexit: implications for devolution’. In 2022, with two Australian colleagues he won an Australian Research Council grant worth c.$400,000 to study Federalism and Constituent Power. Since 2012 he has been a senior fellow of the Centre on Constitutional Change which attracted approximately £5,000,000 in grant funding between 2012 and 2020.
Professor Tierney regularly provides legal advice to governments and other public and private bodies. He is frequently asked to give evidence to parliamentary committees and does a wide range of media work in the areas of United Kingdom and comparative constitutional law and British politics.