Elif Ceylan Özsoy joined Loughborough Law School in December 2025. She completed her LLM in International Human Rights Law and her PhD at the University of Exeter. Prior to joining Loughborough Law School, she worked as a lecturer at Exeter Law School’s Cornwall campus, where she was part of the founding team. She is a qualified lawyer registered with the Izmir Bar Association. Her legal practice has focused on LGBTIQ+ rights, minority rights, and gender based violence cases.
Elif Ceylan Özsoy is a socio legal scholar whose work examines the emergence, expansion, and dismantling of rights, with a particular focus on gender and LGBTIQ+ rights across jurisdictions, especially from non-Western perspectives. Her work draws on feminist, queer, and critical legal approaches, and engages with public international law and human rights law. She has published on the decriminalisation of same sex relations in the late Ottoman Empire, Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, and critical feminist law making using the European Court of Human Rights’ jurisprudence. She is currently developing a broader research agenda that maps the global circulation, contestation, and removal of rights.
Dr Özsoy teaches Human Rights Law, Pro Bono, and Social Justice and Law modules. Her teaching emphasises critical engagement with law. She is committed to decolonial and feminist pedagogies and to supporting students in connecting legal knowledge with social justice practice.
Dr Özsoy has supervised PhD projects on new aspects of human rights protection as part of a supervisory team. She is keen to receive PhD proposals, particularly on LGBTIQ+ rights in non-Western contexts, feminist approaches to law making, and the loss of rights.
- E.C.Özsoy and C.Soykan,‘We are not leaving the Istanbul Convention’:Disappearance of Istanbul Convention from Türkiye and unlikely feminist legal spaces in international law-making (2025) feminists@law,vol 13(2). https://doi.org/10.22024/UniKent/03/fal.1304.
- E.C. Özsoy, 'Critical feminist law-making: Imitative Spaces and Improvised Coalitions' (2023) Australian Feminist Law Journal Vol48 Vol 2 pages 265-294. https://doi.org/10.1080/13200968.2022.2153490.
- N. Ohana, T. Barazi, D.Barrett and E.C. Özsoy et al ‘Rationale and recommendations on decolonising the pedagogy and curriculum of the Law School at the University of Exeter’(2022) Law Teacher, Volume 56, 2022-Issue4. https://doi.org/10.22024/UniKent/03/fal.1304https://doi.org/10.1080/03069400.2022.2140512.
- E.C. Özsoy,‘Decolonising the decriminalisation analyses: Did the Ottomans decriminalise homosexuality in 1858?’ (2021) The Journal of Homosexuality Volume 68, 2021- Issue 12. https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2020.1715142.