Hill, Louis

Louis Hill is a Ph.D candidate at Sciences Po Law School and a lecturer at Le Mans University, where he teaches mainly in the fields of English and French contract law. Louis Hill was awarded a doctoral contract at Sciences Po (2018-2021), during which he taught a course entitled “A Comparative Introduction to Legal Reasoning” for several years. He then worked as a research fellow (ATER) at the University of Lille (2021-2022), where he taught several courses pertaining to the French law of obligations. Subsequently, Louis Hill worked as a research assistant in international law at the Collège de France. He is currently finishing a thesis, under the supervision of Professors Sébastien Pimont and Vincent Forray.

His thesis focuses on the formation and evolution of case law. More specifically, he is taking a critical and comparative look at a widely shared belief in legal studies: the idea that judges spontaneously adapt the law to changing economic and social needs. The aim of his thesis is to show that legal adaptation is often presented as a dynamic process, even though it paradoxically leads to the immobilization of case law. His thesis sheds light on the political instrumentalization of this paradox. Theories of legal adaptation have inspired some of the most influential (neo)liberal thinkers of the twentieth century. This observation led Louis Hill to question, more generally, the influence of jurists on political theory. He is currently studying the influence they have had, or could have in the future, on democratic theory.

He has published several articles on this subject and contributed to the edition of a book on the role of consent in international law (Samantha Besson (ed.), Consenting to International Law, with the assistance of Louis Hill, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2023). He also co-supervised a collective work devoted to the invention, by jurists, of new political utopias (Clarisse Anceau, Élie Aslanoff, Louis Hill, Arié Lévy, Édouard Jourdain, Nicholas Saul-Tarrade (ed.), Les juristes anarchistes: Vers de nouvelles utopies concrètes, Classiques Garnier, Paris, 2024).

Contact: louis.hill@sciencespo.fr