Dr Tom Frost

I joined Kent Law School as a Senior Lecturer in September 2023. At Kent I am the KLS Skills Hub Coordinator, as well as Deputy Chief Examiner.

I have previously held lectureships at the University of Leicester, the University of Sussex and Newcastle University. I have also spent time as a civil servant, working as a Parliamentary Clerk at the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.

I hold a doctoral degree from the University of Southampton, where my thesis focused upon the thought of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, exploring its implications for legal theory and legal reasoning, and I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

My research interests centre upon the idea of justice broadly construed, and the following main areas:

• The history of the British Empire, its governance of its colonies, its involvement in the slave trade, and the position of law in both.  
• Decolonial approaches to Public Law specifically, and the teaching of law more broadly.  
• The figure of the slave in Western European philosophy and political thought.
  

Current research projects include:  

• A research project, funded by the Socio-Legal Studies Association, using archival governmental and historical records, and a decolonial approach. I am writing a student textbook which retells key public law cases through the words and testimonies of those involved, showing how British courts have constructed a memory of the UK constitution which has a blind spot relating to the British Empire.    

• A monograph re-considering the position of the slave in legal and political philosophy, showing how the agency of the enslaved could be used to reconceptualise our widely held ideas of freedom and political action – The Slave in Legal and Political Philosophy: Agamben and his Interlocutors, to be published by Routledge in 2024.
• Investigating the dispossession of the Chagossians from Diego Garcia and the legality of the creation of the British Indian Ocean Territory, including considering how environmental law protections were deployed to curtail the rights of colonised peoples. 
• Considering the conflict between imperial constitutionalism and its operation throughout Empire and the UK courts’ project since the 1960s to develop a modern body of public law, focusing on how imperial constitutionalism can be challenged today through the common law.
  

Undergraduate

• LAWS3270 Introduction to the English Legal System
• LAWS5880 Public Law 1
• LAWS5920 Public Law 2
• LAWS6500 The Law of Contract