Professor Simon Roberts

Simon Roberts graduated from LSE (LLB, l962; PhD, l968). His first teaching appointment was in the Law School at the Institute of Public Administration, Blantyre, Malawi. He returned to LSE in l964 and has been with the Department since then, apart from three years as Adviser on Customary Law to the Government of Botswana (l968-l97l), and a period as Visiting Professor at the University of Aix-en-Provence (l990). He was appointed Professor of Law in l986.

His main research interest has been the anthropology of law, and he has done several periods of field research in Botswana. This has resulted in numerous publications, including Tswana Family Law (Sweet & Maxwell, l972), Order and Dispute (Penguin Books, l979) and, with John L Comaroff, Rules and Processes (University of Chicago Press, l98l). He has also written on property (Understanding Property Law, with W T Murphy, Fontana. l987; 3rd Ed, Sweet & Maxwell, l998). His current work is on dispute processes in different cultures, and he has recently published Dispute Processes: ADR and the Primary Forms of Decision-Making (with Michael Palmer, Butterworths, 1998). He is also working on studies of large city law firms, with Marc Galanter of the University of Wisconsin.

His main teaching is presently in the areas of legal anthropology, property law and dispute processes. (He has taught the LLM course on Alternative Dispute Resolution since 1989). He has lectured widely and participated in many conferences on these subjects in Europe and North America. He was one of the founding teachers on the European Master's Degree in Mediation at the Institut Kurt Bosch, Sion, Switzerland.

Simon Roberts has been on the Editorial Committee of The Modern Law Review since l974, and was General Editor from l988 until l995. He is on the Editorial Boards of a number of other journals and of the Socio-Legal Studies Series published by Oxford University Press. He was a member of the Lord Chancellor's Advisory Board on Family Law (1997- 2001).