Southampton Law School, University of Southampton

LLB (Hons), Lancaster; PhD, Lancaster; Sweet and Maxwell Law Prize 1993.

Caroline joined the School of Law at Southampton as a lecturer in 2003 and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2010. Pre-2003 she tutored and lectured part-time at Lancaster University whilst researching her PhD. Her thesis, entitled ‘Figuring the family: late twentieth-century accounts of lived experience and legal discourse around licensed donor insemination in Britain', provided a qualitative analysis of this under-researched field; and it was published as a monograph by Edwin Mellen Press in 2007. She retains a strong interest in socio-legal research, including empirical research (especially qualitative methods), and participated in the national ESRC RDI programme, Building Capacity in Empirical Socio-Legal Research, at Liverpool Law School, between September 2008 and December 2009.

In 2005, with Jonathan Montgomery, she founded HEAL UoS - the Health Ethics and Law network at the University of Southampton. HEAL is now co-directed by Caroline, Hazel Biggs and Jonathan; this year they secured funding from the Modern Law Review seminar series fund for a project on the role of test case litigation in the development of Health Care Law. She is a member of the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Family Justice Council; BSA Human Reproduction Study Group; Socio-Legal Studies Association; and the Society of Legal Scholars.

Caroline's research interests lie in family law, health care law, tort law, gender and the law. She is particularly interested in the processes of production of law and its impact on society, especially in the context of social and legal constructions of parenthood and kinship, identity, power relations, conflicts of laws re ‘start of life' issues, public policy formation and test case litigation in the health care law context.

She is a founder member and co-director of HEAL UoS, the Health Ethics and Law network at the University of Southampton.

Caroline welcomes enquiries from students interested in undertaking research in any original topic relating to family and health care law generally, and especially those focused upon assisted conception and associated technologies, identity, kinship, public policy and regulation.

One of her current projects is focused on constructions of public policy in the context of assisted conception; a second project is focused on exploring issues regarding cross border reproductive care; and a third concerns the role of test cases in the development of health care law (with Hazel Biggs and Jonathan Montgomery). With regard to the latter project, the co-directors of HEAL are delighted to announce the successful outcome of their bid to the prestigious Modern Law Review seminar series fund to host a dedicated conference on 'Hidden Lawmakers: The Impact of Litigation Strategies on the Development of Health Care Law' - this event was hosted in May 2011 and we are very grateful to the Modern Law Review for its generous support.

Affiliate research groups:  Centre for Law, Ethics and Globalisation , The Centre for Health Ethics and Law (HEAL)