Esther Farnós Amorós

I am a full lecturer in Civil Law at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. I have been conducting research at the Oxford Centre for Family Law and Policy (Oxford University, 2005-2006) and Cornell Law School (Cornell University, 2007-2008), among other institutions. I have been Visiting lecturer in Civil Law at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (2013-2014) and Universitat de Girona (2019-2020). 

My main research interests lie in the field of family law and its intersections with other fields, such as bioethics, torts, contracts and inheritance law. My Ph.D. thesis focused on disputes over frozen embryos after divorce (IV Extraordinary Ph.D. in Law Prize, Pompeu Fabra University, 2011). It was followed by a book on consent to assisted reproductive technologies (Consentimiento a la reproducción asistida. Crisis de pareja y disposición de embriones, Atelier, 2011), which was awarded the XIV Prize for Bioethical Research (Fundació Víctor Grífols i Lucas, 2012). I have published several works, mainly on topics such as family self-determination, legal remedies to torts among family members, parenthood -with special attention to parenthood resulting from access to assisted reproductive technologies- and the effectiveness of surrogacy agreements. Most of my works deal with these topics from a gender approach. I have received the XIII Prize Miquel Casals Colldecarrera for research in Catalan Private Law related to a project on rethinking parenthood.  

I have been a chair of the Harmonization Section of the Codification Committee of Catalonia, which is part of the Justice Department of the Catalan Government, and a member of the Bioethics Committee of Catalonia working group on the right to know one’s biological and genetic origins. I am currently a chair of the Personal and Family Law Section of the Catalan Justice Department and a member of the Catalan Health Department's Committee in charge of developing the Organic Act on Euthanasia. I have collaborated, as national expert, to several reports and comparative works on grounds for divorce (Nuffield Foundation, 2019), surrogacy (Intersentia, 2019) and parenthood (Intersentia, forthcoming). I am member of a research project being carried out at Pompeu Fabra University on multiparentality and complex family relationships. At Universitat Pompeu Fabra I also belong to a Consolidated Research Group for Patrimonial Law. I am part of the Institute of European and Comparative Private Law at the University of Girona.