Mr Matt Jordan
- Research student
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Biography:
Matt Jordan is a doctoral student in Law at Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge. His research uses the sociological concept of liminality to analyse and critique the legal and regulatory architecture governing moments of transition throughout the life cycle.
Prior to commencing PhD study, Matt completed a BA in Law at Downing College, University of Cambridge, before joining the Centre for Law, Medicine and Life Sciences (LML) as a Research Assistant (and later Collaborative Research Projects Co-ordinator). He then obtained an LLM in Medical Law and Ethics from the University of Edinburgh, graduating with distinction. Matt is also a PhD Fellow at Cambridge Family Law, and sits on the Steering Committee of Cambridge Reproduction, a strategic research initiative at the University of Cambridge.
Matt has authored and provided editorial assistance for publications across a range of issues in family law, intellectual property law, and medical law. Select topics include international surrogacy arrangements, the formal recognition of adult relationships and legal gender, patent drafting strategy, patent landscaping in life sciences, and intellectual property issues in biobanking.
Education:
- Ph.D. in Law, Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge (2022-present)
- LL.M. in Medical Law and Ethics, University of Edinburgh (2020-21)
- B.A. in Law, Downing College, University of Cambridge (2013-16)
Scholarships and Prizes:
- Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP Studentship (2023-26)
- Wright-Rogers Studentship, Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge (2022-23)
Professional and Research Experience:
- Collaborative Research Projects Co-ordinator, Centre for Law, Medicine and Life Sciences, Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge (2017-2023)
- Research Assistant, Centre for Law, Medicine and Life Sciences, Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge (2016-2017)
Research
Family Law, Medical Law, Intellectual Property Law.
Thesis: Law as a Master of Ceremonies: Resolving Legal Liminality at the Start of Life
Modern legal systems rely on bounded categories and rigid definitions to organise doctrine, allocate rights and responsibilities, and maintain social order by setting out the limits of permissible behaviours. Such definitions are the source of a subject’s legal status, but they do not always map cleanly onto the practical realities faced by those they govern. While we accept a degree of pragmatism and arbitrariness as a fair price to pay for operational efficiency, too strict a commitment to legal boundedness risks mischaracterising lived experiences, particularly where the objects of regulation sit between settled categories, or transition from one legal status to another. Viewing law and society through the lens of autopoietic systems theory, this thesis argues that divergences between law and social reality are inevitable; both are social systems which abstract information using wholly internal terms of reference, so will imbue the same inputs with different meaning. The question of this research, therefore, is how to reduce the dissonance within a category-based approach to law.
The proposed response is to use liminality, an anthropological account of threshold states, as a legal analytic. This thesis argues that liminality makes three valuable contributions to legal thinking: it identifies marginal cases where law fails to reflect lived reality; it enables a reconceptualization of legal understandings of the self that places process, multiplicity, and propensity for change at the heart of legal design; and it grounds a normative claim that law should guide liminal subjects through their transitions towards a stable legal status which better reflects their self-understanding, thereby promoting legal certainty without abandoning categorisation.
The thesis tests this theory by applying a framework for legal liminality to a series of case studies during moments of transition across the life cycle. In doing so, it assess how well existing legal frameworks embrace liminality, or how they might be improved if they better did so. The project’s original contributions are thus expansionist (applying liminality to new legal questions), analytical (designing and utilising a novel framework for legal liminality), and normative (arguing how law might be reformed or reconceptualised to better resolve uncertainties experienced by liminal entities).
Supervisor(s): Supervisor: Prof. Stephen Gilmore Advisor: Prof. Kathy Liddell Advisor: Prof. Claire Fenton-Glynn (Monash)
Research centres: Cambridge Family Law Centre (CFL); Cambridge Socio-Legal Group (CSLG); Centre for Law, Medicine and Life Sciences (LML)