Alice Margaria, Prof. Dr. iur.
- Assistenzprofessorin für Rechtsfragen der Reproduktion und Humangenetik
- Co-director‚ URPP Human Reproduction Reloaded
Alice Margaria is Assistant Professor in Law and Reproduction at the Faculty of Law, University of Zurich, Switzerland, where she also co-directs the interdisciplinary research programHuman Reproduction Reloaded. Prior to joining the University of Zurich, she was a Senior Researcher at the Department of ‘Law and Anthropology of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle, Germany). She holds a PhD in Law from the European University Institute (Florence, Italy).
Her research sits at the intersection of family law, legal gender studies, human rights law, and law and anthropology. She has published widely on issues related to parenthood, reproduction, and care, with a particular focus on fatherhood and non-traditional families. Methodologically, she combines doctrinal analysis with qualitative empirical research to examine what law does to families and the extent to which it (mis)recognises or fails to recognise their lived experience.
In her recent project, Who is the Court for? Bringing the Human (Back) into Human Rights Research, Alice conducted fieldwork at the European Court of Human Rights to explore how judges engage with the human dimension of human rights adjudication, particularly amid procedural reforms affecting access to justice. She is also the academic lead of TransReg, a survey aimed at tracing the birth registration experiences of trans and non-binary people in the UK, conducted in collaboration with Equality for Trans Families.
She is the author of The Construction of Fatherhood: The Jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2019), and co-editor of Leading Works in Law and Anthropology (Routledge, 2024), What is a Family? Law and Regulation in a Transdisciplinary Context (Bristol University Press, 2026), and The Oxford Handbook on Families and the Law (forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2027). Furthermore, Prof. Margaria is the Principal Investigator of the project “Who is the Court for? Bringing the Human (Back) into Human Rights Research” funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.
