Dr Louise Loder

Dr Louise Loder is Senior Lecturer in Law and Director of Employability at the University of Exeter Law School. In this role, she has fundamentally redesigned the legal and employability skills provision across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes to ensure that graduates leave with foundational future-of-work competencies, including AI literacy, legal project management and legal design thinking. She designed and leads the ‘Exeter Employability’ series of events co-created with law firms, practitioners and NGOs, that teach critical skills typically underexplored in the curriculum, such as strategy, storytelling, negotiation and public speaking. 

Louise has convened and taught modules including Legal Foundations, Legal Research and Writing, Intellectual Property Law, Technology and Human Rights, Business and Human Rights, and Constitutional and Administrative Law. She is passionate about the future of legal education and skills for the future of law. Her scholarship focuses on the education, training, wellbeing and protection of human rights defenders, with particular interests in freedom of expression and information, open justice and academic freedom. She recently co-chaired the Association of Law Teachers Annual Conference 2026 at Exeter Law School, which welcomed Sir Geoffrey Vos and Kirsty Brimelow KC as keynote speakers, and in 2025, she was awarded a grant to research excellence in law teaching in the university law school (the 'Great Law Teachers' project, which she worked on with Professor Greta Bosch)..

Beyond the Law School, Louise is Vice-Chair of the Learning and Development Committee at the Devon and Somerset Law Society, Vice-Chair of the Human Rights Lawyers Association, and an Executive Committee member of the Association of Law Teachers. Since 2021, she has served as Education and Training Lead to the Bar Human Rights Committee of England and Wales, advising on and convening virtual panel events and network engagement initiatives that spotlight global human rights and rule of law concerns.

Louise came to law teaching after a 20-year career in senior corporate communications, strategic project leadership and programme management. Early in her career, she worked with The Sydney Morning Herald, Dubai Media City, the Dubai International Film Festival and the Forbes CEO Middle East Forum before returning to the UK to establish her human rights and sustainability communications practice. While doing so, she studied law as a mature student, achieving First Class Honours, later completing an LLM with Merit in International Human Rights Law and her PhD at Exeter with a fully funded university scholarship.

Over the years, Louise has served as a subject matter expert on rule of law and legal education projects, reports and training platforms, and has held senior advisory roles for NGOs, supporting Board and Executive Committee communications, programmes, stakeholder engagement, working on behalf of clients with international advocacy partners such as the International Bar Association, the American Bar Association, the ILO, OECD, World Bank, UN Women, and the Foreign, Commonwealth & Develoment Office, as well as private sector, government and civil society stakeholders worldwide. In her various roles as a Senior NGO Advisor, she has led the research, planning and implementation of consensus-building initiatives focused on gender equality and inclusion, gender-based violence, technology and human rights, the future of work, AI and justice, rule of law, and judicial independence. In 2017-2019, she was the lead speechwriter and researcher for a Commissioner on the ILO Global Commission on the Future of Work.

Louise regularly chairs, speaks at and supports human rights, sustainability and education events, and is a panel speaker at the Google Higher Education Summit in June 2026 on infusing the legal curriculum with AI literacy and employability skills. A committed lifelong learner, she has a CIM Diploma in Digital Media & Branding and has completed numerous CPD short courses including Business & Human Rights at the London School of Economics and Political Science; Law & Logic at the European University Institute Summer School co-hosted by EUI and Harvard Law School; and most recently, the University of Oxford’s Leading Strategic Projects programme at Said Business School. Louise is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and received a 2024 Special Recognition Award for Exceptional Creativity in IP Teaching from the Global Women Innovators Network.