UCD graduate appointed High Court President
A UCD graduate has been nominated by the Government to be named President of the High Court.
Mr Justice Nicholas Kearns, who completed the Bachelor of Civil Law programme in the 1960s, currently sits on the Supreme Court of Ireland and will succeed Mr Justice Richard Johnson who turns 72 this month and is thus due to retire. Justice Kearns’s appointment creates a vacancy on the Supreme Court.
Justice Kearns was called to the bar in 1968, and was appointed a senior counsel in 1982. He had been designated as the judge with remit for commercial law matters in the High Court upon his appointment in 1998, and was nominated to the Supreme Court bench in November 2004. He has also twice been an alternate judge in the European Court of Human Rights.
It is expected that either Justice Frank Clarke, current chairman of the Referendum Commission, or his predecessor Justice Iarflaith O’Neill will now be appointed to Justice Kearns’s seat on the Supreme Court.
