Dr Sarah Trotter

Dr Sarah Trotter

Assistant Professor of Law

LSE Law School

Telephone
0207-955-7258
Room No
Cheng Kin Ku Building 7.08
Languages
English, Welsh
Key Expertise
Family law; European human rights law

About me

Sarah is an Assistant Professor of Law. Her research focuses on the way in which the human condition is imagined in European human rights law and the assumptions that are made in law about how we relate to one another and ourselves. Her recent work in this context concerns questions of what it might mean to live with a sense of a ‘right to hope’; the construction of notions of truth and reality in family law; and the role of ideas about absence, loss, and lack in the construction of the category of personal identity in European human rights law.

Sarah convenes and teaches the LL221 Family Law course and co-convenes and teaches the LL211 Law, Poverty and Access to Justice course and the LL245 Feminist Legal Theory course. She is an Academic Fellow of the Middle Temple, a member of the Modern Law Review’s Editorial Committee, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and a member of the International Law Book Facility’s Operating Committee. She wrote her PhD thesis (‘On coming to terms: How European human rights law imagines the human condition’) at LSE, where she also taught family law and EU law on the LLB programme and human rights on the Summer School programme. She holds an LLB from LSE (including an Erasmus year at Sciences Po, Paris) and an LLM from the University of Cambridge.

Research Interests

Dr Paulsen draws upon rigorous archival research to afford a historical context to contemporary concerns. She is completing a book (with Oxford University Press) that will reconceptualise normative debates concerning the functions and limits of the most-favoured-nation principle for multilateral trade governance during the interwar period. Her forthcoming article in the Yale Journal of International Law (2025) reconstructs U.S. planning for multilateral institutions designed to secure the global economy, with two case studies from 1947 to 1953 to demonstrate how U.S. trade policy never separated economics and security. Her 2020 article, Trade Multilateralism and U.S. National Security: The Making of the GATT Security Exceptions, has been cited by a WTO dispute settlement panel report for the dispute US — Origin Marking (Hong Kong, China).

Research Projects

Trade and security; economic security strategies; safeguards and industrial policies; risk regulation; law and politics of the World Trade Organization; sustainable development; alternate norms of most-favoured-nation.

Teaching

Articles