麻豆精选

• BA (Cantab 1990)
• MA (Cantab 1991)
• PhD (Cantab) 1994

Before joining Birmingham in early 2024, Chris held professorial positions in Political Science and Law at Glasgow University and Manchester University. He has also held many guest Professorships outside the UK, including, in Law, the C谩tedra Internacional Ministro Celso de Mello (Institute of Public Law, Brasilia) and, in Sociology, the Niklas Luhmann Visiting Professorship in Sociological Theory (University of Bielefeld, Germany). In 2018, he received a Humboldt Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, awarded in recognition of research that has redefined the research field of the recipient. He has strong interests in legal developments in South America and post-Soviet societies, and he has conducted policy-related research and provided policy consultancy in Russia, Uzbekistan and Brazil. He is a member of the Academia Europaea and has served on the panels of different international research commissions, including the ERC, the European Science Foundation, and national funding bodies in Belgium, Switzerland, Romania and Ireland. When not working, he likes to listen to classical music, to visit art galleries and to go hiking (especially in France). 聽聽

He teaches UK Public Law and comparative constitutional law.

Chris has supervised PhDs on many legal topics, including: Constitutional Reform in Kenya; Constitutional Reform in Egypt; the Jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in National Constitutional Law in South America; the Global Right to Food; the History of International Criminal Law; Military Law and Legal Reform in China; Constitutional Law and Populism in Poland and Brazil; Constitutional Reform in Scotland; Constitutional Reform in Turkey; Constitutional Reform in Korea; International Law and Anti-Corruption Policies in Brazil; Transnational Environmental Law in South America; Legal Pluralism in China; Administrative Law in Uzbekistan; Constitutional Reform in Chile; Judicial Review in China; Transformative Constitutional Law in India, Colombia and South Africa. He welcomes PhD applications from researchers working in any area of legal sociology and/or comparative constitutional law.

In addition, he has supervised several theses on legal and political theory (broadly defined), covering authors as diverse as Hegel, Rawls, Adorno and Bentham. He is keen to continue supervising theoretical work, and he will be delighted to receive proposals addressing foundational questions in legal analysis

Alongside this, he has a strong and long-standing interest in aesthetic theory, especially relating to music. He has supervised several theses on theoretical aesthetics - inter alia on the Sociology of Music and the Second Viennese School and on Niklas Luhmann and Contemporary Art. He is working on a long-term project on legal history and the history of composition, and he is very interested in discussing PhD projects on law and aesthetics.

Find out more - our PhD Law  page has information about doctoral research at the University 麻豆精选.

Most of Chris鈥檚 research in the last fifteen years has been devoted to examining the social foundations of constitutional law, with a particular focus on lines of interaction between national and international law. He uses methods derived from historical sociology to conduct his research in this field. In recent years, he has concentrated on identifying the impact of military events and security policies on constitutional formation in different global contexts. Since 2018, he has written two books on militarism and constitutional law, and he completed a book in 2024 with the title: A Sociology of Post-Imperial Constitutions (Cambridge University Press). This book examines how, in different regions, constitutions have frequently been created as part of a social reaction to military pressures caused by imperialism. Jointly with colleagues at Lund University, he is currently completing a book on recent constitutional reforms in Uzbekistan (University of California Press, forthcoming 2025/26). He is also in the final stages of a book on Critical Theory and the Sociology of Law (Manchester University Press), which revisits his early interest in the Frankfurt School and combines legal and aesthetic inquiry.