Dr Eric Loefflad

Dr Eric Loefflad is an interdisciplinary scholar specialising in the history and theory of public international law, broadly understood. He received his PhD from Kent Law School in 2019 and also holds a BA in Political Science from the Pennsylvania State University, a JD from the Gonzaga University School of Law, and an LLM from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Eric has been admitted as attorney before both the Supreme Court of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the Tribal Court of the Kalispel Nation. 

Eric’s primary research concerns the multifaceted coevolution of international law and modern political consciousness. Particularly, he is interested the historically rooted material aspects that shape the international legal order's simultaneous enabling and constraint of radical political transformation. In his doctoral thesis, he examined how the concept of ‘popular will’ (as the basis of domestic authority under international law) emerged in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries as the expansion of colonial capitalism manifested through the American Revolution, French Revolution, post-Napoleonic formation of the European states-system, independence of Latin America, and establishment of the United Nations system. Refining this research has led Eric to engage numerous discourses including theories of revolution, theories of empire, the relationship between sovereignty and property, and the methodological synthesis of critical legal history with global historical sociology. In an intimately related capacity, Eric is deeply fascinated by the meta-legacy of the Cold War and its continued reproduction of durable crises within contemporary legal and political thought. 

Eric teaches on a variety of modules at KLS that include core private law topics (Intro to Obligations, Contracts, Foundations of Property, Land Law, Equity and Trusts, etc) as well as international legal topics (Public International Law: Principles and Sources, International Human Rights Law in Context, International Criminal Law, etc).