Professor Anne-Maree Farrell
Professor of Medical Jurisprudence
Director of Mason Institute
BA, LLB, BLitt, MA, PhD
Research Leave 2023-2024
Email: a.farrell@ed.ac.uk
SSRN: Papers
View my publicationsProfessor Anne-Maree Farrell is Chair of Medical Jurisprudence at Edinburgh Law School. She is the first woman to hold the Chair, which was first established over 210 years ago.
She is admitted to legal practice as a solicitor in Ireland, England & Wales and Australia. Prior to becoming an academic, she worked as a lawyer in private legal practice, specialising in mass torts, product liability and clinical negligence.
She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS).
Mason Institute
Professor Farrell is Director of the Mason Institute, which is an interdisciplinary research centre based at Edinburgh Law School. It focuses on ethics and law at the interface between health, medicine and the life sciences at a national and global scale. It provides internationally recognised academic and policy leadership in the socio-legal, medical and life science governance, and bioethics fields.
In line with the Institute’s commitment to academic and policy leadership, Professor Farrell is actively engaged in expert advisory work in law, ethics and governance issues in health and medicine. Current appointments include being a member of the UK Home Office’s Biometrics and Forensic Ethics Group (BFEG) and the Scottish Government’Abortion Law Review Expert Group. Past appointments have included being a Commissioner on the Bingham Centre’s Independent Commission on UK Public Health Emergency Powers and a member of British Medical Association (BMA)’s Medical Ethics Committee. Such work has also involved the provision of informal and formal expert advice and commissioned research reports. Examples include co-authored reports provided to the UK Infected Blood Inquiry and the Scottish Covid-19 Inquiry.
Teaching
Professor Farrell currently engages in research-led teaching across a range of courses in health and medical law.
Edinburgh Law School has a proud and long tradition in research-led teaching in health and medical law, as well as its relationship to bioethics. Over forty years ago, the late Professor J. Kenyon Mason and Professor Alexander McCall Smith published the first edition of a textbook in the area. She also acts as lead editor/author for Mason and McCall Smith’s Law and Medical Ethics, the UK’s leading textbook in medical law and ethics, and now in its 12th edition.
Research expertise
Professor Farrell's research expertise lies generally in health law and bioethics. She is particularly interested in the relationship between politics, law and regulation in health and medicine.
She has specific interests in the following areas and would welcome inquiries about PhD supervision in such areas:
- Public health and health security: law, ethics and risk
- Devolution and health law
- Human tissue: law, ethics and risk (e.g. blood, cells, organs)
- Clinical negligence & patient safety
- Harm & redress: healthcare settings, online environments, no-fault schemes
- Mental health law & policy
Professor Farrell has published widely in a range of internationally recognised journals and edited collections. Her sole-authored book, The Politics of Blood: Ethics Innovation and the Regulation of Risk (Cambridge University Press, 2012) was published in hardback in 2012 and in paperback in 2014. Other books include Health Law: Frameworks and Context (Cambridge University Press, 2017) with J Devereux, I Karpin and P Weller; Pioneering Healthcare Law: Essays in Honour of Margaret Brazier (Routledge, 2016) co-edited with C Stanton, S Devaney and A Mullock; European Law and New Health Technologies (Oxford University Press, 2013), co-edited with M Flear, T Hervey and T Murphy and Organ Shortage: Ethics Law and Pragmatism (Cambridge University Press, 2011), co-edited with D Price and M Quigley.
Research Projects
Professor Farrell has been successful in obtaining over £1.76 million in competitive funding from the following bodies (A-Z): Australian Research Council, British Academy, Economic and Social Research Council, Leverhulme Trust, Nuffield Foundation, Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Wellcome Trust. Funded projects have examined the regulation of human bodies/tissue; the relationship between health, technology and regulation; the law and ethics of organ donation and transplantation; clinical negligence litigation; no-fault compensation for medical injury; and cross-border access to healthcare.
Current research projects
When Borders Change: Public Health, Trade and the Role of Law
This project aims to understand the shifting boundaries of the post-Brexit relationship between public health, trade and the law in the UK and Ireland, including North-South relations on the island of Ireland. Specifically it focuses on the law, ethics and the commercial determinants of health. It involves an academic collaboration between the University of Edinburgh and University College Cork, as well as liaison with the Public Health Ethics Special Interest Group, UK Faculty of Public Health and the Institute of Public Health, Ireland. The project is funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Legal Transplants and Policy Transfers: Legislating for Organ Donation in a Devolved UK
This project involves a socio-legal study of recent initiatives to introduce deemed consent regimes across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, contrasting these to evaluate the significance of the UK’s devolution settlement in health law. Through engagement with policy-makers and stakeholders via qualitative interviews, as well as reviewing parliamentary, policy and media outputs across the four nations, the project investigates the values pursued by law reformers and the extent of policy learning between them. The project is funded by the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust.
Tech-Sex: The Technological Transformation of Sex: Improving Australia's Response
This project involves a socio-legal study of how new technologies are transforming the ways in which people seek and enact sexual connections and experience sexual intimacy. The project is being led by colleagues based at the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health & Society (ARCSHS). Professor Farrell is leading on the law strand of the project, examining the management of risk in online environments, as well as questions of redress arising from online harms. The ARCSHS project website can be accessed here. The project is funded by the Australian Research Council.
Twitter: @amfarrell101