{"id":10425,"date":"2015-07-24T04:22:48","date_gmt":"2015-07-24T20:22:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/law\/profile\/maria-obrien-hylton\/"},"modified":"2026-07-22T16:50:27","modified_gmt":"2026-07-22T20:50:27","slug":"maria-obrien","status":"publish","type":"profile","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/law\/profile\/maria-obrien\/","title":{"rendered":"Maria O’Brien"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maria O’Brien<\/strong> is the Paul M. Siskind Scholar and Professor of Law at Boston University where she began teaching after several years in private practice. She has taught at the University of Chicago Law School, DePaul Law School and Boston College Law School.<\/span><\/p>\n

While in law school Professor O’Brien served as an editor of the <\/span>Yale Law & Policy Review<\/i>.\u00a0 Following graduation, she clerked for Judge Gilbert S. Merritt of the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and then as a litigation associate at the Boston law firm of Hale & Dorr. She has numerous publications to her credit, most recently articles about DB pension plan recoupments of overpayments, university plan fiduciary duties and plan fee litigation, public sector unions and <\/span>Janus<\/i>, and ERISA “Church plans” and a chapter in The Law of Fraternities and Sororities on insurance liability issues. She recently presented “Developments in Fiduciary Law and ESG” to the International Pension and Employee Benefits Law Association (IPEBLA, based in Toronto, Canada) at their biennial conference in Dublin, Ireland.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Professor O’Brien teaches courses on employment law, ERISA, contracts and Insurance Law.\u00a0 She is a member of the American Law Institute (ALI) and serves on the board of the Pension Action center which provides free legal services to low-income retirees and their dependents. In 2021, she was appointed by Governor Charles Baker to serve on the Massachusetts Division of Labor Relations Advisory Council. She is also a Fellow of the American College of Employee Benefits Counsel (ACEBC) and has served a chair of the AALS Employee Benefits and Social Insurance Section on several occasions.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4833,"template":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/law\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/10425"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/law\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/law\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/profile"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/law\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4833"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/law\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/10425\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":124273,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/law\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/10425\/revisions\/124273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/law\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}