NUIM Department of Law

Lecturer

Specialisms:

• Constitutional law 
• The use of fundamental rights in private law 
• Legal pluralism in the Malawi legal system
• Competing conceptions of property in the age of fundamental rights in the SADC region

Before joining the Law Department at NUI Maynooth, Dr Banda taught law at University College Cork. Prior to his academic career, Dr Banda practised law in Malawi and went on to work in the area of law reform in the Law Reform Commission of Malawi. As part of his law reform work he spent time at the South African Law Reform Commission. Dr Banda has also worked for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Uganda where he was involved in safeguarding the rights and well-being of refugees from the Great Lakes, the East and Central Regions of Africa. Dr Banda holds an LLB (Hons) degree from the University of Malawi. He holds an LLM degree in Law in Development, with distinction, from the University of Warwick in the UK (where he was a Chevening scholar of the British Council). He completed his PhD degree at University College Cork (where he was a William J. Leen scholar) and his research benefited from a competitive grant from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Washington D.C, USA.

Dr Banda’s research interests are focused on investigating the public and private divide in the practice of law and in legal theory. His research covers the use of fundamental rights in private law; legal pluralism in the Malawi legal system and the competing conceptions of property in the age of fundamental rights. If you are interested in pursuing a PhD degree in any of the above research areas, contact Dr Banda by email.

Dr Banda’s research has been published by leading law journals in the UK (the Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal and the African Journal of Law) and Ireland (the Dublin University Law Journal). He is an adviser to the Rule of Law Malawi Project of the Law Society of Ireland and has presented at the annual workshop for African Chief Justices and Senior Judiciary hosted by the Law School at Trinity College Dublin.

Dr Banda teaches Constitutional Law, Administrative Law and International Business Law.
Download Dr Banda’s papers at http://eprints.nuim.ie/view/authors/Banda,_Sibo.html