Personal Statement
Professor Barker’s research takes a feminist approach to the broad areas of constitutional and family law. Her publications include the Hart/SLSA prize-winning monograph, Not the Marrying Kind: A Feminist Critique of Same-Sex Marriage (Palgrave, 2013) as well as two edited collections and numerous articles and book chapters on the topics of marriage and conjugality, assisted reproduction, and LGBT rights in the UK and the British Overseas Territories. She was also commissioned by the United Nations to prepare a background paper on the evolution of marriage for their flagship report, ‘Progress on the World’s Women 2018: Families in a Changing World’, which was published in the UNWomen Discussion Paper Series. Professor Barker was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship 2018-19 to undertake a feminist critique of the UK’s Human Rights Act. She won the SLSA Impact Prize 2025 for her work on challenging the revocation of same-sex marriage in Bermuda in Ferguson and Others v the United Kingdom (no.35043/22) and is a member of the editorial board and co-ordinating editor of Feminist Legal Studies. She was elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2025.

Research Overview
Professor Barker's research takes a feminist perspective on several aspects of family law and human rights law, with a particular focus on LGBT families and LGBT rights under the ECHR in the UK and its overseas territories.