Professor Yvonne Daly is an expert on effective criminal defence and the legal regulation of criminal investigations, and has published widely on these topics, both nationally and internationally. Her articles on the right to silence, the right to legal assistance, improperly obtained evidence, and related topics, have been published in the Journal of Law and Society; the Human Rights Law Review; the Journal of Human Rights Practice; the International Journal of Evidence and Proof; the New Journal of European Criminal Law; the International Journal of the Legal Profession; the Irish Criminal Law Journal; the Dublin University Law Journal, and more. She is a co-author of Irish Criminal Justice: Theory, Process and Procedure (Clarus Press, 2010). a co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Irish Criminology (Routledge, 2015), and sole editor of Police Custody in Ireland (Routledge, 2024).

Prof Daly led the Irish project team on the EU-funded SUPRALAT project, which developed and delivered a training programme for criminal defence lawyers on providing the best defence to suspects detained for police questioning, along with colleagues at Maastricht University, Antwerp University, the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, and PLOT Belgium. 

Prof Daly was also the Principal Investigator for Ireland on another EU-funded project - EmpRiSe: Right to silence and related rights in pre-trial suspects’ interrogations in the EU: legal and empirical study and promoting best practice. This project examined the operation of the pre-trial right to silence in Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy. Prof Daly and her team worked on this project with colleagues at Maastricht University, the University of Antwerp and KU Leuven.

Prof Daly has previously been a visiting scholar at the Faculty of Law, University of Auckland (2010/2011); a National Rapporteur on Criminal Procedure to the International Academy of Comparative Law (2010); a Director of the Association for Criminal Justice Research and Development (ACJRD) (2015-2019); and Vice-Chair of the Ethical, Political, Legal and Philosophical Studies Committee of the Royal Irish Academy (2014-2018). She is an elected member of the DCU Governing Authority, and a Director of the Trust for Civil Liberties.
Prof Daly is also very interested in legal education and has written a number of articles in this area. She co-edited Teaching Evidence Law: Contemporary Trends and Innovations (Routledge, 2020) with Prof Jeremy Gans (Melbourne Law School) and Prof P.J. Schwikkard (University of Cape Town). Part of Routledge’s series on Legal Pedagogy, this book, with a Foreword by Prof William Twining, sets out the contemporary experiences of evidence teachers in a range of common law countries across four continents. It addresses key themes and places these in the context of academic literature on the teaching of evidence, proof and fact-finding. The chapters describe innovative ways of overcoming the many challenges of this field, addressing the expanding fields of evidence law, how to reach and accommodate new audiences with an interest in evidence, and the tools devised to meet old and new pedagogical problems in this area.

Prof Daly and the late Dr Vicky Conway undertook a research project on solicitors' experiences in Garda Síochána stations. This involved over 40 semi-structured interviews with criminal defence practitioners all around Ireland and the resulting book - Criminal Defence Representation at Garda Stations (Bloomsbury 2023) - provides both a narrative account of their experiences in relation to advising and representing detained persons and some guidance on how this might best be done.