Long(er) Bio
Florian (Fabian) Hoffmann was born on February 7, 1972 in the northern German university town of Göttingen but grew up in the southern Black Forest community of Freiamt. He went to school at the Goethe Gymnasium in Emmendingen and, as an AFS exchange student, spent the year 1989-90 at St. Francis High School in Milwaukee, WI (USA).
After his Abitur in 1992 he won a scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes) and, upon completion of his mandatory social service in the city of Hamburg, went on to read for a degree in Law and Government (BSc Econ) at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), which he concluded in 1996 with first class honours.
He then moved to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he first interned at the (then) joint Human Rights Watch/Americas–CEJIL country office and, in 1997, began a two-year Mestrado em Ciências Jurídicas (Master in Legal Science) at the Departamento de Direito (Law Department) at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) with a scholarship from CAPES. He completed this in 1999 with a dissertation on ‘Law between Integrity and Différance: Ronald Dworkin’s Legal Theory and the Possibility of its Deconstructive Critique´.
Later that year, he commenced doctoral studies at the Law Department of the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence (Italy) with a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and under the joint supervision of Prof. Wojciech Sadurski and Prof. Philip Alston; during his time at the EUI he also worked as a research assistant for Prof. Alston and served for two years as an elected researcher representative. He defended his thesis on ‘Are Human Rights Transplantable ? – Reflections on a Pragmatic Theory of Human Rights under Conditions of Globalization’ in January 2004 and was later awarded the first Mauro Cappelleti Prize on the Best Thesis on Comparative Law at the EUI. That same year he was also involved, together with with Frédéric Mégret and Thomas Skouteris, in the organization of the inaugural conference of the European Society of International Law (ESIL-SEDI).
He then returned to Brazil and became a full time faculty member of the Law Department at PUC-Rio as an assisstant professor and also joined his Department’s human rights center, the Núcleo de Direitos Humanos, as one of its academic coordinators. During this period he, inter alia, coordinated the Brazil-leg of a multi-country study on the impact of social rights litigation on the provision of public health care and education (Varun Gauri and Daniel Brinks, Courting Social Justice), and worked on projects on the interface between trade, development, and human rights as well as on access to justice and rights consciousness in underpivileged communities in Rio de Janeiro.
In 2008 he returned to the LSE Law Department to take up a lectureship in international law and became tenured there in 2010. During his time at LSE he, amongst others, co-organized a workshop series on ‘Kelsen / Schmitt / Arendt and and the Possibilities of International Law,’ and consulted with the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on the human rights aspects of the Millenium Development Goals and on the Guiding Principles on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights; he also co-coordinated, with Frédéric Mégret, a project on Dignity: A Framework for Vulnerable Groups within the the Swiss Initiative to Commemorate the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
In 2010 he took up a tenured full professorship (W3), the Franz Haniel Chair of Public Policy, at the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy at the University of Erfurt (Thuringia/Germany). From 2011 to 2012 he served as deputy director of the Brandt School, and from 2012 to 2015 as its director. There he coordinated an English-taught interdisciplinary Masters in Public Policy (MPP) and a doctoral programme in International Conflict Management and oversaw around 150 students and staff as well as a sizeable grant budget. He also helped establish the ‘Willy Brandt Summer Schools in Managing Fragility – Good Governance in Transition Contexts’ as well as the Commitment Award initiative.
In mid-2015 he returned to the PUC-Rio to take up a tenured professorship at the Law Department, where he has resumed his work on international law, human rights and legal theory (see current Projects). Besides being, again, associated with his Department´s Núcleo de Direitos Humanos he is also part of the steering group of the Sergio Vieira de Mello Chair at PUC-Rio on Refugee Studies (Cátedra Sergio Vieira de Mello (CSVM)). In 2024 he spent an academic sabbatical year, inter alia, at the Faculté de Droit e Criminologie at the Université Catholique de Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium), being hosted by Prof. Julie Ringelheim; at the Danish Research Foundation Center of Excellence in Global Mobility Law (MOBILE) in the Faculty of Law at the University of Copenhagen, hosted by Prof. Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen; and at the Cluster of Excellence – Contestations of the Liberal Script (SCRIPTS), hosted by Prof. Thomas Risse and Prof. Tanja Börzel at the Free University of Berlin (Institute for Political Science), and by Prof. Philipp Dann at the Humbold University Berlin (Faculty of Law).
He has co-edited, with Peter Goodrich, Michel Rosenfeld, and Cornelia Vismann (+) , Derrida and Legal Philosophy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), with Anne Orford and Martin Clark, The Oxford Handbook of the Theory of International Law (Oxford University Press, 2016), and with Kalpana Kannabiran and Bettina Hollstein, Discourses on Corruption: Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Perspectives (Sage 2021). He is on the editorial boards of World Comparative Law / Verfassung und Recht in Übersee (WCL/VRÜ) and the London Review of International Law and has previsouly served on the editorial boards of the German Law Journal, the Leiden Journal of International Law, and Transnational Legal Theory. He is married to international relations scholar Andrea Ribeiro Hoffmann who works at the Instituto de Relações Internacionais (IRI) at PUC-Rio; they have two adult kids.