Award-winning researcher in international law, development and global governance, Professor Luis Eslava has been appointed to lead La Trobe Law School's Research Group on International Law and Global Transformation.
Professor Eslava's pioneering work uses ethnographic, historical and socio-legal approaches to charting the global legal, political and economic order.
Professor Fiona Kelly, Dean of the La Trobe Law School, said there is enormous excitement ahead of Professor Eslava joining the Law School.
"Professor Eslava is a scholar of global repute who will offer significant leadership and expertise to the Law School's burgeoning international law research group," Professor Kelly said
"He will make a significant contribution to the School's strategic objective to become a leading centre of scholarship on international law and global transformation, and the challenges we are collectively facing in the 21st century."
Professor Eslava has engaged in large inter-institutional collaborations spanning multiple jurisdictions in the developing world and produced edited volumes, monographs, special issues, documentaries, policy reports, art interventions and photo-based essays as outcomes of his research.
He joins La Trobe University from the University of Kent where he has served as co-director of the Centre for Critical International Law (CeCIL) and supervised a vibrant body of international postgraduate research students at Kent Law School.
"I'm privileged to be joining La Trobe Law School which has brought under a single institutional umbrella a stellar group of international legal scholars dedicated to understanding some of today's most pressing global issues and the current transformation of our existence on this planet," Professor Eslava said.
"Joining La Trobe is a unique opportunity to work with an extraordinary body of colleagues and doctoral, postgraduate and undergraduate students, at a time when governments and communities are seeking new ways of understanding the present and new solutions for living fairly, justly and less destructively together."
Professor Eslava will commence in this role in October 2023.
He intends to retain a connection with Kent Law School, which has the potential to expand the international outreach of La Trobe Law School and open up new opportunities in terms of research collaborations and staff and student mobility.
About Professor Luis Eslava
Based at Kent Law School since 2014, Professor Eslava is also Senior Fellow at Melbourne Law School, International Professor at Universidad Externado de Colombia, and he regularly serves as Programme Faculty at the Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP) Global Workshops, Harvard Law School.
He co-directs the International Law and Politics Collaborative Research Network at the Law and Society Association (LSA), and is the Director of The IEL Collective's international socio-legal action research initiative Ruptures21.
Professor Eslava's research has been awarded the 2016 SLSA Early Career Academic Prize, and the 2016 Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA) Hart Socio-Legal Book Prize, the highest award for a monograph in the field of socio-legal studies in the United Kingdom.
He recently received the 2022 Glasgow Law School Research Award, and he is delivering the 2022-2023 International Law and the Global South annual course at the Graduate Institute in Geneva (IHEID).
