Professor Kirsty Horsey

PhD (University of Kent)

  • Professor of Law
Publications
ORCiD
Kirsty Horsey
  • Personal website

    • Professor Kirsty Horsey is a socio-legal scholar with interests in assisted reproductive technologies and the creation and regulation of modern family forms.

    Prior to joining Loughborough Law in 2025, Kirsty obtained her PhD and taught for many years at Kent Law School. 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. In 2021-2023 she undertook two years working in industry as Senior Research Associate at London Women’s Clinic.

    Kirsty’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, and where gendered or othered harms occur. Kirsty co-authors (with Professor Erika Rackley) Tort Law, a leading textbook in the field, published by OUP and currently in its 9th edition.

    Kirsty is currently a co-investigator on Children’s Voices in Surrogacy Law, a project which listens to the views of children and young people on surrogacy law reform. The project has published two interim reports, one on Phase 1 of the project, which involved children and young people aged 8-17 born through surrogacy, as well as the children of surrogates and one on Phase 2, which involved children and young people from primary and secondary schools with no experience of surrogacy aged 8-18. Phase 3 of the project was completed in 2024, involving children born from international surrogacy.

    Kirsty regularly collaborates with the UK’s non-profit surrogacy support organisations, charitable organisations and practising surrogacy lawyers. 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, which helped to inform the Law Commission of England and Wales and Scottish Law Commission’s joint project on surrogacy law reform. She is currently working on a project with SurrogacyUK, looking at surrogates’ and intended parents’ birth experiences.

    Kirsty has taught Tort Law and Advanced Topics in Tort for many years. She has also previously taught Contract Law and Family Law and some Law and Medical Ethics modules.

    Kirsty is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She has previously been an external examiner for law programmes at LSE, Manchester Metropolitan University, The Open University, Lancaster University and the University of Aberdeen. She is currently an external examiner (undergraduate and LLM) at Birmingham University.

    Kirsty has successfully supervised several PhDs to completion, with thesis topics including:

    • Comparative socio-legal analysis of surrogacy laws in Greece and the UK
    • Racial matching of gamete donors in UK fertility clinics
    • Civil law regulation of social media

    She has been external examiner for several PhDs, including at the Universities of Bristol, Cardiff and Galway.