Professor Kirsty Horsey FAcSS

Professor Kirsty 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 (see publications list). Professor Horsey is also part of the secretariat for the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Surrogacy. She is currently a co-investigator in the Children’s Voices in Surrogacy Law project. She also co-authors, with Professor Erika Rackley, a leading law textbook, Tort Law.

Professor Kirsty Horsey has LLB and PhD degrees and a PGCHE. Professor Horsey graduated in both undergraduate law and her PhD from the University of Kent and first started as a lecturer in law at Kent Law School in 2005. She is also an Academic Associate at 1GC Family Law, one of the foremost family law barristers' Chambers in London, and in September 2024 was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Professor Horsey’s research interests lie primarily in the regulation of surrogacy, other forms of assisted human reproduction and genetic technologies. She is particularly interested in where these areas overlap and intersect with issues in family law, especially the concept of legal parenthood. Her long-term research project focuses on reform of the UK’s laws on surrogacy. She also researches within the law of tort, in particular those obligations based on ‘relationship’, assumptions of responsibility and/or imbalances of power.

Undergraduate

• The Law of Tort: LW651
• Advanced Topics in Tort Law: LW652