Professor Julia Black PBA

Julia Black is President of the British Academy, the UK’s national academy for humanities and social sciences. She is also Strategic Director of Innovation and Professor of Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She was Pro Director of Research from 2014-19 and interim Director of LSE from 2016-17. Julia holds a number of other roles, notably she is an External Member of the Bank of England’s Prudential Regulation Committee, Senior Independent Member of the Board of the UK Research and Innovation Council, a member of the Council of Science and Technology and a member of the Board of the Courtauld Institute of Art. Julia is also a director of Zinc, a social sciences, mission based incubator.

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 a number of areas, and has advised policy makers, 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 – 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 Years’ Honours List for services to the study of law and regulation.