Members

Professor Stephen Gilmore - Director

Professor Gilmore is a University Professor in Family Law, Director of the Cambridge Family Law Centre, and a Fellow of Jesus College Cambridge.  He was formerly Professor of Family Law and a Vice-Dean in the Law School at King’s College London, and prior to that taught Family Law in the University of Oxford, and at UEL.

Professor Gilmore has written extensively on issues in family law and child law, but with a particular interest in the law relating to parental responsibility, the resolution of parental disputes, and children’s rights. His work has examined the legitimacy of the bases upon which the courts exercise discretion in family law, and he is particularly interested in the connections between law and social science research evidence relating to child well-being. Recent work has also explored the issue of a parent's implacable hostility to a child’s contact with the child’s other parent. 

Stephen's full biography and list of publications are available on the Faculty website.

He can be contacted on sg995@cam.ac.uk

Dr Jan Ewing - Deputy Director

Dr Ewing is a University Assistant Professor in Family Law, Deputy Director of the Cambridge Family Law Centre, and a Fellow of Homerton College Cambridge. She was formerly a Teaching Fellow and Module Leader of Family Law at Queen Mary, University of London and a Research Fellow at the University of Exeter.

Her research interests are in children’s rights, particularly the exercise of those rights when parents settle out of court following separation. She is also interested in understanding what makes intimate relationships flourish over time. A former family law solicitor, Dr Ewing is the co-author of Mapping Paths to Family Justice: Resolving Family Disputes in Neo-Liberal Times, which was awarded the Hart-SLSA Book Prize in 2018. Her co-authored monograph, 'The right to be heard: children's voices, family disputes and child-inclusive mediation' will be published in 2024.

Dr Ewing is an invited member of the Family Solutions Group set up by Sir Stephen Cobb in 2020 to consider what can be done to improve the experience of children and families before an application is made to the family court. She has been a Research Fellow on a number of empirical research projects, including Mapping Paths to Family Justice and the evaluation of the DWP-funded 'Mediation in Mind' project.

Jan's full biography and list of publications is available on the Faculty website.

She can be contacted on je277@cam.ac.uk

Dr Brian Sloan - Deputy Director

Brian is an unestablished Assistant Professor in Property Law at the Faculty of Law and a Fellow of Robinson College. He has a wide range of interests within the broad field of family law, including on the topic of care. His first book, Informal Carers and Private Law, won the Faculty of Law's Yorke Prize, and he is the current author of Borkowski’s Law of Succession. He also writes on the regulation of adult relationships, the application of property law in the domestic sphere, the empowerment and protection of vulnerable adults, gender recognition and child law (including children's rights). Brian has a particular interest in adoption, and his work in the area has been cited with approval by the UK Supreme Court.

He has been an Early Career Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) in Cambridge, and held visiting positions at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, the University of New South Wales, Utrecht University, City University of Hong Kong and Pepperdine University, Malibu, California. His research has covered jurisdictions including England and Wales, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, Scotland and Hong Kong SAR. He is a member of the Cambridge Reproduction SRI and of the International Advisory Board of FamRZ.

Brian's full biography and list of publications is available on the Faculty website.

He can be contacted on bds26@cam.ac.uk  

Dr Anna Heenan – Deputy Director

Anna is an Assistant Professor in Family Law in the Faculty of Law, and Fellow in Law at Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge.

Her research focuses on the financial consequences of relationship breakdown. She has published on a range of family law issues and is co-author of the Family Law Concentrate revision guide published by OUP. Her current research looks at the financial arrangements reached by separating parents, and how these intersect with childcare responsibilities. As part of this work, she spent time as a visiting researcher at the University of Uppsala in Sweden.

Anna is a case notes editor for the Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law. Anna was previously a solicitor in practice. She has advised on the operation of financial remedies law in England and Wales for the purposes of Canadian litigation.

She can be contacted on ach220@cam.ac.uk

Joanna Miles

Joanna is Emerita Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. She was Professor in Family Law & Policy at the University of Cambridge until October 2022 when she changed career into professional horticulture after over a quarter-century in the law.

During her academic career, she taught and researched in a wide range of domestic and comparative family law and family justice issues, in particular in the areas of adult family relationships, property and financial remedies. She worked for the Law Commission, and on Family Justice Council and Pension Advisory Group projects. She was also Academic Door Tenant at 1 Hare Court, Temple, London, from which she acted as an academic consultant in some key family law cases, notably for the wife's successful appeal in Wyatt v Vince [2015] UKSC 14 and for the husband’s successful defence in Owens v Owens [2018] UKSC 41.

She retains an active interest in family law (for a little while longer) as she pursues two projects in her “retirement”: the 5th edition of her textbook with Rob George (UCL) and Sharon Thompson (Cardiff), Family Law: Text, Cases, and Materials (OUP) due out in 2023, and a contribution to a new edited collection Politics, Policy and the Private Law (vol 1), edited by a team from Cambridge, forthcoming from Hart in 2023.

Her latest book, Fifty Years of the Divorce Reform Act 1969, with Daniel Monk (Birkbeck) and Rebecca Probert (Exeter) (eds) was published by Hart in 2022. You can refer to Joanna's full list of publications.

She can be contacted on jkm33@cam.ac.uk

Professor Jens M. Scherpe

Professor Jens Scherpe, founding Director of Cambridge Family Law, has left Cambridge and his position as Professor of Comparative Law at the Faculty of Law to take up a chair in Comparative Law at the University of Aalborg. There he also is the Director of the Nordic Centre for Comparative and International Family Law. He will remain connected to Cambridge Family Law as a member of the Management Committee and to Cambridge as an Emeritus Fellow of Gonville and Caius College.