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About
Matthew is a Fellow in Law and joined LSE Law School in 2026. Prior to this, he was a doctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge, where his work was supervised by Prof. Stephen Gilmore and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. His thesis explores whether and how law ought to respond to resolve prolonged experiences of legal liminality at the start of life.
Since 2016, Matthew has been a member of the Centre for Law, Medicine and Life Sciences, joining first as a Research Assistant, and later as Collaborative Research Projects Co-ordinator. There he carried out empirical research on patent landscapes in the life sciences and coordinated international collaborations including the Collaborative Research Program in Biomedical Innovation Law, funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation. He was also a Steering Committee Member of Cambridge Reproduction, an interdisciplinary research centre hosted at the University of Cambridge that explores the urgent challenges posed by reproduction today.
Prior to his doctoral studies, Matthew read a BA in Law at Downing College, University of Cambridge, and an LLM in Medical Law and Ethics at the University of Edinburgh.
Research
Research Interests
Matthew’s work focuses on the ‘human’ legal questions that shape how we structure and experience our lives, with a particular emphasis on our bodies, relationships, and transitions across the life course. His current work principally sits at the intersection of family law and medical law, and draws on socio-legal theory and concepts from social anthropology (such as liminality). He also has an ongoing interest in intellectual property and the life sciences.
In family law, Matthew's interests include legal parenthood, birth registration, surrogacy, and the interaction between legal gender recognition and parental status. In medical law, he works on the regulation of assisted reproduction, the status of embryos and stem cell-based embryo models, the metaphysics of pregnancy, and the implications and governance of emerging health technologies.
Matthew also has a background in empirical research, and has published quantitative and doctrinal studies of the intellectual property policies of large human biobanks, the repositioning of generic drugs, and the patent landscapes of drug repurposing and cancer diagnostics.
Publications
M Aboy, K Liddell, C Crespo, M Jordan, S Hogarth and J Powell, ‘Mapping the Patent Landscape of Cancer Diagnostics’ (2025) 43(12) Nature Biotechnology 1921.
J Liddicoat, K Liddell, J Darrow, M Aboy, M Jordan, C Crespo and T Minssen, ‘Repositioning Generic Drugs: Empirical Findings and Policy Implications’ (2022) 53(9) International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law 1287.
M Aboy, K Liddell, M Jordan, C Crespo and J Liddicoat, ‘European patent protection for medical uses of known products and drug repurposing’ (2022) 40(4) Nature Biotechnology 465.
M Jordan, J Liddicoat and K Liddell, ‘An empirical study of large, human biobanks: intellectual property policies and financial conditions for access’ (2021) 8(1) Journal of Law and the Biosciences lsab018.
M Aboy, C Crespo, K Liddell, J Liddicoat and M Jordan, ‘Was the Myriad decision a ‘surgical strike’ on isolated DNA patents, or does it have wider impacts?’ (2018) 36(12) Nature Biotechnology 1146.
M Jordan, ‘Law and Practice of Surrogacy Conference’ (2018) 48(9) Family Law 1233.
M Aboy, J Liddicoat, K Liddell, M Jordan and C Crespo, ‘After Myriad, what makes a gene patent ‘markedly different’ from nature?’ (2017) 35(9) Nature Biotechnology 820.
K Liddell, J Liddicoat and M Jordan, ‘IP Policies for Large Bioresources: the fiction, fantasy, and future of openness’ in T Minssen, JR Herrmann and J Schovsbo (eds) Global Genes, Local Concerns – Legal, Ethical and Scientific Challenges in International Biobanking (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019).
M Jordan, ‘More Than One, But Not Yet Two: Conceptions of Pregnancy and Birth in English Law’.