Professor Anne-Maree Farrell

Professor of Medical Jurisprudence

Director of Mason Institute

BA, LLB, BLitt, MA, PhD

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Email: a.farrell@ed.ac.uk

SSRN: Papers

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Professor 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) and an Overseas Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law (AAL).

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. 

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); Scottish Government’s Abortion Law Review Expert Group;  Scottish Government’s Health Mis/Dis-Information Implementation Group; and acting as the Independent Legal Expert to the Northern Ireland Department of Health’s Public Health Law Reform Steering 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 

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. Professor Farrell 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, now in its 12th edition and engages in research-led teaching across a range of courses in health and medical law.

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: politics, policy and 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 and capacity law 

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; cross-border access to healthcare; public health ethics and law; public health, trade and the law; regulation of tech-sex; health law and UK devolution.