Professor Emilie Cloatre

Professor Emilie Cloatre is a socio-legal scholar whose main research interests lie in the intersection between law and contemporary 'science and society' issues, including pharmaceutical flows, access to health, and the regulation of alternative and traditional medicine. Her approach to law is influenced by insights from Science and Technology Studies. Her publications include Pills for the Poorest: an Exploration of TRIPS and access to Medicines in sub-Saharan African (Palgrave McMillan, 2013 - awarded the 2014 Hart Socio-Legal Book prize) and Knowledge, Technology and Law (Routledge, 2014, with Martyn Pickersgill). From 2025, she will lead a Wellcome Discovery Award entitled: “Between Deception and Dissent: Regulating Unproven, Disproven and Misleading Health-Related Claims’.  This collaborative project will explore how contested health-related claims are regulated in contemporary states; examine the socio-political implications of current strategies; and imagine and propose alternative legal models. The research will be based in three regional zones: Europe (France, Greece, Ireland, and the UK), West Africa (Ghana and Senegal), and North America (Mexico and Canada), and bring together well-established qualitative methods, innovative cross-disciplinary strategies, and critical approaches to law and to the making of legitimate knowledge. In addition to its key empirical and conceptual contributions, this Discovery Award will aim to build capacity for interdisciplinary research at the crossroad of law and the health social sciences and humanities, disrupting persistent barriers to the development of critical knowledge on law, health, and society.

Before joining Kent in 2010, Emilie Cloatre was a lecturer at the School of Law, University of Nottingham, and ESRC postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Science and Society, University of Nottingham. 

Professor Cloatre’s research interests concern the relationship between law and medicine, and the politics of healthcare. Her research has interrogated the important and frequently neglected issue of how law and medical practices constitute each other, with a particular attention to postcolonial contexts. Her key concern has been to explore the importance of law in furthering, perpetuating or, potentially, challenging health inequalities. This has been articulated around three themes: social justice and access to healthcare; ownership, medicine and global (in)equalities; and, more recently, resistance and legal change. 

Conceptually, her work is located at the crossroad of law, Science and Technology Studies and (legal and medical) anthropology, and aims use such interdisciplinary insights to enhance understandings of law in practice. From 2013-2015 she led the AHRC network Technoscience, Law and Society, and is co-Director of the  Social Critiques of Law Research Group (SoCriL)) since 2013. From 2017-2023 she led a Wellcome Investigator Award entitled ‘Law, Knowledges and the Making of ‘Modern’ Healthcare’, that explored how selected states in Western Europe, West Africa and the West Indian Ocean regulate alternative and traditional medicine.

Law, Science and Technology.

I welcome application from PhD students in my areas of expertise. This includes research on law and medicine, public and global health, as well as projects related to my broader thematic interests (development and inequalities, scientific knowledge and law, expertise and governance). I am also happy to consider projects that echo my conceptual and methodological interests (Law and posthuman theories; law and anthropology; law and Science and Technology Studies).