Kent Law School’s Professor Kirsty Horsey has been elected to the Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, the representative body of the social sciences in the United Kingdom.
The Academy’s Fellowship comprises leading social scientists from academia, the public, private and third sectors. Their expertise covers the breadth of the social sciences, and their practice and research addresses some of the major challenges facing communities, society, places and economies.
Professor Horsey was nominated for the Fellowship for her ’empirical and policy work on surrogacy regulation’.
Professor Horsey’s long-term research interest focuses on the laws regulating surrogacy. She has worked with external non-profit and charitable organisations to facilitate and encourage reform. One such collaborative project – the SurrogacyUK Working Group on Surrogacy Law Reform – led to the publication of two Research Reports on the state of the law governing surrogacy, together with recommendations for reform, in 2015 and 2018, that informed the work of the Law Commission of England and Wales and Scottish Law Commission, who jointly recommended changes to the law on surrogacy in 2023. An edited collection examining and responding to the Law Commissions’ proposed reforms will be published in early 2025.
More recently Professor Horsey has collaborated on empirical work with My Surrogacy Journey and SurrogacyUK, both non-profit organisations in the UK supporting surrogates and intended parents, and has held a two-year position as a Senior Research Associate at the London Women’s Clinic (LWC) and London Egg Bank. She is currently working on a collaborative project titled ‘Children’s Voices in Surrogacy Law’ exploring the experiences and understandings of children born through surrogacy (both domestic and international), or whose mothers were surrogates, and comparing these to views of children with no connection to surrogacy.
Other Law School colleagues who are Fellows in the Academy include Professor Rosemary Hunter, Professor Diamond Ashiagbor, Professor Erika Rackley and Professor Amanda Parry-Kessaris.
Professor Horsey’s publications include the best-selling textbook Tort Law (co-authored with colleague Professor Erika Rackley, currently 8th edition, 2023) and edited collections in the same area (Diverse Voices in Tort Law, Bristol University Press, 2024) and on the regulation of assisted reproduction in the UK (Revisiting the Regulation of Human Fertilisation and Embryology, Routledge, 2015).
At Kent, she convenes both the Law of Tort and Advanced Topics in Tort Law, and supervises PhD students on topics related to assisted reproduction, surrogacy and related areas of medical and family law.