Rate My Professor Sue Westwood

Professor Sue Westwood is Professor of Law and Head of York Law School at the University of York. She holds a BSc, GDL, PGDip from the University of London, MA from Middlesex University, MA from the University of Southampton, and a PhD. Westwood joined York Law School in 2018 as a Lecturer, was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2021, Reader in 2024, and became Head of Department in 2025. Previously, she was a research fellow and research associate at the University of Oxford, University of Leeds, and University of Surrey. She has taught law at Keele University, Coventry University, and Southwest University of Political Science and Law in Chongqing, China, and served as a Visiting Scholar at the Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative, Emory University School of Law, Atlanta, USA. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a member of York Law School’s Learning and Teaching Development Team and its Staff-Student Forum.

Westwood’s interdisciplinary research centres on ageing, equality, and human rights, combining law and social gerontology to examine older persons' rights and older women’s rights. Current projects address regulatory implications of everyday ageism and sexageism, ageism in the media, regulatory exclusions of older women, menopause discrimination, and older persons, vulnerability, resilience, humanitarian laws, and armed conflict. She supervises a PhD candidate under a WRoCAH-funded Collaborative Doctoral Award with the LGBT Foundation on using the arts to facilitate intergenerational LGBTQ+ dialogue. Key publications include the books Ageing, Gender and Sexuality: Equality in Later Life (2016), Regulating the End of Life: Death Rights (2021, editor), and Research Handbook on Law, Society and Ageing (2024, co-editor); and articles such as “A bloody mess? UK regulation of menopause discrimination and the need for legal reform” (Journal of Law and Society, 2024), “Older LGBTQ people and religious abuse: implications for the UK regulation of care provision in later life” (OBM Geriatrics, 2024), and “Can religious social workers practice affirmatively with LGBTQ service recipients?” (Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law, 2022). In 2022, she was an invited expert at a World Health Organisation international consultation informing its report on Tackling Elder Abuse. Westwood reviews for journals including Ageing and Society, Gerontologist, and Journal of Medical Ethics; publishers such as Routledge and Policy Press; and funders including the ESRC and NIHR.