Academic Profile

Julia Black is President of the British Academy, the UK’s national academy for humanities and social sciences. Prior to becoming Warden, she was a Professor of Law and Regulation at the London School of Economics and Political Science where she also held a number of senior executive roles including Pro Vice Chancellor of Research from 2014 to 2019 and interim Vice Chancellor from 2016 to 2017, and Strategic Director of Innovation from 2019 to 2024.

Julia holds several other external roles; notably, she is an External Member of the Bank of England’s Prudential Regulation Committee and the Financial Markets Infrastructure Committee, a member of the Prime Minister’s Council of Science and Technology and a member of the Board of the Courtauld Institute of Art. From 2017 to 2023 Julia was Senior Independent Member of the Board of the UK Research and Innovation Council. Julia is also a director of Zinc, a social sciences, mission-based incubator and a visiting Professor at the LSE Law School.

Julia completed her first degree in Jurisprudence and her DPhil at Oxford University and joined the LSE Law Department of the LSE in 1994. Her primary research interest is the legitimacy and dynamics of regulatory systems, including transnational and non-state regulators. She has written extensively on regulatory issues in several areas and advised policymakers, consumer bodies, law reform bodies and regulators on issues of institutional design and regulatory policy in the UK and overseas over many years. She has received grants from the British Academy, Leverhulme Trust, the ESRC and the Canadian SSRC.

She has been a visiting fellow at the University of Sydney, All Souls College, Oxford and in 2014 was the Sir Frank Holmes Visiting Professor in Public Policy at the Victoria University, Wellington, NZ. She served as an independent Board member of the Solicitors Regulation Authority from January 2014 to December 2018 and chaired its Policy Committee. She was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2015, and an Honorary Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford in 2017. She received a lifetime achievement award from the Standing Group on Regulatory Governance of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) in 2016 and was awarded a CBE in the 2020 New Year’s Honours List for services to the study of law and regulation.