Esther Farnós Amorós

I am an Associate Professor of Civil Law (with tenure) at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), where I graduated in 2002 and obtained my PhD (2010). 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 work has mainly dealt with Catalan, Spanish and comparative Family Law, although I have also explored the law of the persons, the law of damages and succession law. My PhD thesis focused on disputes over frozen embryos after divorce (IV Extraordinary PhD in Law Prize, UPF, 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, the effects of matrimonial property regimes during and after family breakdown and parenthood, with special attention to parenthood resulting from access to assisted reproductive technologies. I received the XIII Prize Miquel Casals Colldecarrera for a project on rethinking parenthood which led to the book "El dret de filiació avui. Una reflexió sobre el paper de la biologia, la voluntat i els conceptes 'pare' i 'mare'" (Atelier, 2023).

I have been a member of the Harmonization Section of the Codification Commission of Catalonia, which is part of the Justice Department of the Catalan Government. I am currently a member of its Section on the Law of the Persons and Family. I am also a member of the Commission in charge of developing the Organic Act on Euthanasia and of the Bioethics Commission of Catalonia, both dependent on the Health Department of the Catalan Government. As a national expert I have collaborated to several reports and comparative volumes on grounds for divorce (Nuffield Foundation, 2019), surrogacy (Intersentia, 2019; and forthcoming) and parenthood (Elgar, 2025). I am currently a member of a research project being carried out at UPF on self-determination in personal and family law. At UPF 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 Universitat de Girona.