Roger Cotterrell

Roger Cotterrell is the Anniversary Professor of Legal Theory at Queen Mary, University of London and was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 2005. Previously he was the Acting Head of the Department of Law, Head of the Department of Law, Professor of Legal Theory and the Dean of the Faculty of Laws at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London. He studied law at University College London as an undergraduate and postgraduate and began his teaching career at the University of Leicester as a lecturer in law in 1969. After returning to London in 1973, he studied sociology and politics at Birkbeck College while teaching law full-time at Queen Mary College. Thereafter he was one of the small group of law and sociology academics in Britain who first specialised in the new field of sociology of law from the 1970s. His leading book on the subject has been translated into several languages. From the late 1990s he developed a 'law and community' approach to socio-legal theory, attempting to replace sociology of law's traditional 'law and society' approach, and stressing links with comparative law and the study of law's embeddedness in culture.