Biography

Academia

I studied law and sociolegal studies at the LSE, Warwick, and Yale Law School. I took my PhD in sociology at Northwestern University in Chicago under the supervision of Howard Becker, Jack Heinz and Art Stinchcombe. I worked at the American Bar Foundation as a research associate and Indiana University-Bloomington before joining the University of Westminster. I have been an Exxon Fellow in Ethics in the Poynter Center at Indiana University, an Academic Visitor in the Sociology Department at LSE, a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies. I am currently a Visiting Professor at the Institute for the Transformation of the State at Bremen University in Germany.

Research

My research focuses primarily on the legal profession and the globalization of law. My first major study was of barristers' clerks, which is being revisited through a Nuffield Foundation sponsored grant. This was followed by an ethnography of a large law firm in Chicago looking at the organisation of the law firm and the relationships between lawyers and clients. I have continued to study the role and position of legal elites in society, especially in the global context. Here my research has looked at the globalization of insolvency as initiated by the Maxwell insolvency, the development of the large global law firms and MDPs, and the relationships between financial institutions and their professional advisers in the context of capital markets. Recent research, funded by the German Science Foundation at Bremen University, examines cross-border lawmaking in large law firms (see www.sfb597.uni-bremen.de on links page).

My research agenda has now diversified from this course, but not away from, into the field of dispute resolution as represented by the Financial Ombudsman Service and also research into legal aid and access to justice, and, from a comparative perspective (in part for the Lord Carter Review), the ways courts allocate cases among judges.

Current research projects include: Barristers' clerks (with Avis Whyte, Law School, University of Westminster); globalization, law and lawyers (book project); the role of the chief executive in law firms (with Carole Silver, Northwestern University School of Law); the future of legal practice in Asia-Pacific; the implications of Clementi.

The In Progress page features my latest papers that are awaiting publication. They indicate what I am involved with currently.

Teaching

John Flood teaches on the masters' courses in the law school being responsible for teaching research methods and introductory approaches to globalization and law, as well as supervising a number of PhD students. I also teach a summer school course on Global Lawyering for the University of Miami School of Law.

Contact Details

Please see the Contacts page for full details of how you can get in touch with me.

• Home
• Biography
• CV
• Publications
  • By Date
  • By Keyword
  • Articles, Reviews & Essays
  • Books, Monographs & Reports
  • Chapters In Books
• In Progress
• News
• Events
• Blog Posts
• Search
• Related Links
• Guestbook