Michael Fitzgerald Email and Phone Number

In mid-2020, Michael reoriented his career from the creative sector toward the study of law. Since then he has graduated as Valedictorian at both bachelor and master level. Michael acheived the highest average grade among cohorts of over 300 bachelor students at Tilburg University's Global Law LLB, and over 70 master students at the Europa-Institut's LLM in European & International Law at Saarland University, respectively.In October 2023, Michael begins his doctoral research in the Department of Law at the European University Institute in Fiesole, Tuscany, under the supervision of Professor Nicolas Petit. He is currently employed, with Professor Ciarán Burke of the Jena Centre for Reconciliation Studies, in the production of commentaries and recommendations for constitutional reform in the context of Korean reconciliation.Michael recently completed a variety of internships and assistantships producing academic research and policy recommendations; with the Dutch Ministry of Justice, on class action reform and the public financing of collective redress; with Follow-This, an environmental shareholder initiative, assisting in the production of shareholder resolutions for proposition at the annual general meetings of Shell, ExxonMobil and BP among others; with Tilburg University Labour Law Dept. in the collation of a survey of trends relating to the collective bargaining rights of non-standard workers, for presentation to the European Trade Union Congress 2021. Michael's background is in the arts, and he has extensive experience in the creative sector, having worked variously as a freelance artist, writer and gallerist. Between 2012 and 2020, Michael's work was shown in over 30 exhibitions internationally, including in Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Germany and the United States. Michael's doctoral thesis (2023 - 2027) proposes to trace the ascendancy of the major social media platforms as an emerging form of sovereignty within democratic constitutionalism. Michael's proposal asks the following research questions; how should the legal order of the platform be understood, both in its internal and external dimension, as a matter of constitutional theory, and should that order be understood as developing within, or beyond, the sovereign authority of the state; within or beyond the reach of the state’s institutions of representative democracy?