Professor Camillia Kong

PhD (London School of Economics)

  • Professor of Law and Philosophy
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Camillia Kong

Camillia is a philosophy and law scholar with expertise in medico-legal conceptualisation of mental capacity, the ethics of psychiatry and psychiatric genomics, and the hermeneutics and phenomenology of mental disorder. She is the author of two books on mental capacity, Mental Capacity in Relationship: Decision-Making, Dialogue, and Autonomy (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Overcoming Challenges in the Mental Capacity Act 2005: Practical Guidance for Working with Complex Issues (Jessica Kingsley, 2018, co-authored with Alex Ruck Keene). Prior to joining Loughborough University she was at the School of Law at Queen Mary University of London. She was the Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded Judging Values and Participation in Mental Capacity Law Project (2018-2022).  Camillia completed her PhD at LSE and was previously a Senior Researcher at the University of Oxford and Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Kent. She has held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Ethox Centre, University of Oxford.

Camillia’s research adopts an interdisciplinary approach that spans philosophy, legal studies, and anthropology.  Her focus has been on the law, ethics, and theorisation of disability and mental disorder. She has particular interest in cultural intersections in approaches to mental disorder and intellectual disability. Other areas of Camillia’s work explore how relational and gender contexts impact the development of selfhood and mental disorder and conceptions of cognitive disability, and how these contexts intersect with the construction of legal agency.  

Camillia is currently working on projects developing a phenomenological conceptualisation of intentional agency to transform legal agency in disability rights and law. Camillia was the Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded project, Judging Values and Participation in Mental Capacity Law project (2018-2022) at Birkbeck College. View the final project report for the Judging Values project [PDF 5,832KB]. The Judging Values and Participation in Mental Capacity Law project team produced two publicly available professional development videos targeting Court of Protection practitioners on YouTube:

Other research projects of Camillia’s have been supported by the British Academy, Wellcome, AHRC, and ESRC.

Camillia will be teaching topics on conceptions of law and legal theory as well as the ethical-legal issues related to mental capacity and mental health law. Her approach to teaching is fundamentally interdisciplinary, using philosophical and lived experience perspectives to push the boundaries of what matters in the law and encourage students to interrogate their own values in engaging with the difficult legal decisions in the context of medical law and bioethics.

Books

  • Kong, C., Coggon, J., Cooper, P., Dunn, M., and Ruck Keene, A. (eds.), Capacity, Participation and Values in Comparative Legal Perspective (Bristol University Press, 2023).
  • Kong, C. & Ruck Keene, A., (2018) Overcoming Challenges in the Mental Capacity Act 2005: Practical Guidance for Working with Complex Issues (foreword by Anselm Eldergill, Jessica Kingsley Publishers). Reviewed by:
  • Kong, C. (2017) Mental Capacity in Relationship: Decision-Making, Dialogue, and Autonomy (Cambridge University Press). Reviewed by:

Articles

  • Kong, C., Coggon, J., Dunn, M. (2024). ‘Giving Meaning to Values in Mental Capacity Law’, Law Quarterly Review.
  • Kong, C. (2023). The Phenomenology and Ethics of P-Centricity in Mental Capacity Law. Law and Philosophy, 42(2), 145-175.
  • Kong, C., Stickler, R., Cooper, P., Watkins, M., & Dunn, M. (2022). Justifying and practising effective participation in the Court of Protection: an empirical study. Journal of Law and Society, 49(4), 703-725.
  • Kong, C., Stickler, R., Cooper, P., Watkins, M., Dunn, M., (2022) ‘The ‘Human Element’ in the Social Space of the Courtroom: Framing and Shaping the Deliberative Process in Mental Capacity Law’, Legal Studies: 1-20.
  • Kong, C. (2019). Constructing female sexual and reproductive agency in mental capacity law. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 66, 101488.