About me

Sarah is an Assistant Professor of Law. Her research focuses on the way in which the human condition is imagined in European human rights law and the assumptions that are made in law about how we relate to one another and ourselves. Her recent work in this context concerns questions of what it might mean to live with a sense of a ‘right to hope’; the construction of notions of truth and reality in family law; and the role of ideas about absence, loss, and lack in the construction of the category of personal identity in European human rights law.

Sarah convenes and teaches the LL221 Family Law course and co-convenes and teaches the LL211 Law, Poverty and Access to Justice course and the LL245 Feminist Legal Theory course. She is an Academic Fellow of the Middle Temple, a member of the Modern Law Review’s Editorial Committee, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and a member of the International Law Book Facility’s Operating Committee. She wrote her PhD thesis (‘On coming to terms: How European human rights law imagines the human condition’) at LSE, where she also taught family law and EU law on the LLB programme and human rights on the Summer School programme. She holds an LLB from LSE (including an Erasmus year at Sciences Po, Paris) and an LLM from the University of Cambridge.

Sarah's research is in the fields of European human rights law, family law, and socio-legal studies. The focus of much of her work is on the way in which the human condition is imagined in European human rights law and the assumptions that are made in law about how we relate to one another and ourselves.

LL209: Law, Society and Morality: Contemporary Controversies in the Courts (summer school course)

LL211 Law, Poverty and Access to Justice

LL221 Family Law

LL245 Feminist Legal Theory

'The Question of Family Law After Legal Motherhood' (2025) LSE Public Policy Review 3(4):3, 1-10
Book review: 'The Gender of Capital: How Families Perpetuate Wealth Inequality by Céline Bessière and Sibylle Gollac and translated by Juliette Rogers' (2025) International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family 39 (1), ebaf005
'Living with a Sense of a Right to Hope' (2024) Social & Legal Studies (also published as LSE Legal Studies Working Paper No 25/2024)
'The construction of a right to birth registration in European human rights law: the case of G.T.B. v Spain' (Strasbourg Observers, 23 February 2024)
'Thinking about secret birth', in Nigel Lowe and Claire Fenton-Glynn (eds.), Research Handbook on Adoption Law (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2023)
'Truth and Reality in Family Law', in Stephen Gilmore and Jens Scherpe (eds.), Family Matters – Essays in Honour of John Eekelaar (Intersentia, 2022)
'Narratives of Absence: On the Construction and Limits of the Category of Personal Identity in European Human Rights Law' in J. Marshall (ed.), Personal Identity and the European Court of Human Rights (Routledge, 2022)
‘On the potential of place and place of potential’ (contribution to the symposium on Legal Geography and EU Law) (2022) European Law Open 1(1), 135-139
'Hope’s Relations: A Theory of the "Right to Hope" in European Human Rights Law' (2022) Human Rights Law Review 22 (2), ngac007
‘Ways of Being Together During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Support Bubbles and the Legal Construction of Relationships’ (2021) Frontiers in Sociology 6:730216 doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2021.730216 (See also 'Bubbled up: the support bubble as a new legal form' (LSE COVID-19 blog, 2 November 2021))
Book review: ‘Individual Rights under European Union Law. A study on the relation between rights, obligations and interests in the case law of the Court of Justice by Catherine Warin (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2019)’ (2020) Common Market Law Review 57 (5), 1648-1651
Book review: 'EU Non-Discrimination Law in the Courts: Approaches to Sex and Sexualities Discrimination in EU Law by Jule Mulder. (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2017)’ (2019) Common Market Law Review 56(3), 868-70
'The regulation of urban gulls across the UK: a study of control measures' (2019) British Birds 112 (May), 282-292.
'The State of Divorce Law' (2019) Cambridge Law Journal 78 (1), 38-41
'Birds Behaving Badly: The Regulation of Seagulls and the Construction of Public Space' (2019) Journal of Law and Society 46 (1), 1-28 (republished in: Journal of Law and Society: 1974-2021 Virtual Issue [2021 Socio-Legal Studies Association Conference])
'The Child in European Human Rights Law' (2018) Modern Law Review 81(3), 452-479
'The ethos of replaceability in European human rights law' in N. Segal and J. Owen (eds.), On Replacement: Cultural, Social and Psychological Representations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
'"Living together", "learning together", and "swimming together": Osmanoğlu and Kocabaş v Switzerland (2017) and the construction of collective life'(2018) Human Rights Law Review 18(1), 157-169
with Damian Chalmers, 'Fundamental Rights and Legal Wrongs: The Two Sides of the Same EU Coin' (2016) European Law Journal (1), 9-39

Dr Sarah Trotter

Assistant Professor of Law

LSE Law School

About me

Research Interests

Teaching

Articles