Rate My Professor Emilie Cloatre

Professor Emilie Cloatre is Professor of Medical Law in the Dickson Poon School of Law at King’s College London. A socio-legal scholar, her main research interests lie in the intersection between law and medicine, exploring how law and health knowledges shape each other and law's impact in furthering, perpetuating, or challenging health inequalities. She has studied these dynamics in areas including access to healthcare, pharmaceutical flows and medicine amid global inequalities, and the regulation of alternative and traditional medicine. Her approach draws on Science and Technology Studies, socio-legal studies, and legal anthropology, informed by qualitative research across diverse socio-cultural settings. Her work has been funded by the Wellcome Trust, AHRC, and ESRC. She currently leads a £5 million Wellcome Discovery Award project titled “Between Deception and Dissent: Regulating Unproven, Disproven and Misleading Health-Related Claims” (2025-2031). This collaborative effort critically examines how contested health-related claims are regulated in contemporary states across Europe (France, Greece, Ireland, UK), West Africa (Ghana, Senegal), and North America (Mexico, Canada); assesses socio-political implications; and proposes alternative legal models, while building interdisciplinary capacity at the crossroads of law and health social sciences and humanities.

Prior to joining King’s College London, Professor Cloatre held positions at the University of Kent and the University of Nottingham, where she obtained her PhD in Law (2006). In April 2025, she was elected to the Fellowship of the Academy of Social Sciences. Her publications encompass two books—Pills for the Poorest: An Exploration of TRIPS and Access to Medication in Sub-Saharan Africa (2013) and Knowledge, Technology and Law (co-edited with Martyn Pickersgill, 2015)—and 38 research outputs, including recent peer-reviewed articles such as “States, law, and the regulation of controversial health-related claims: consolidating a research agenda between disciplines and contexts” (Wellcome Open Research, 2025), “Displacements: objects and relationality” (Law and Society Review, 2024), “Resistance, regulation, and governmentality: interrogating the defunding of homeopathy in France and England (2000 to 2022)” (Social Theory and Health, 2024), “The objects of legality” (Journal of Law & Society, 2024), and “In the shadow of the healing rainbow: belonging and identity in the regulation of traditional medicine in Mauritius” (Griffith Law Review, 2023). She has capacity to supervise PhD students.