John Armour appointed Dean of the Faculty of Law

The Faculty of Law is delighted to announce the appointment of John Armour, Professor of Law and Finance, to the Deanship of the Faculty, with effect from Michaelmas Term 2023. John is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the European Corporate Governance Institute, a Professorial Fellow of Oriel College, and an Honorary Fellow of Pembroke College.

John read Law at Pembroke College, before continuing to study there for the BCL and then the LLM at Yale Law School. He has published widely in the fields of company law, financial regulation, and corporate insolvency. His main research interest lies in the integration of legal and economic analysis, with particular emphasis on the impact on the real economy of changes in company law, corporate insolvency law and financial regulation. He serves as an Executive Editor of the Journal of Corporate Law Studies and the Journal of Law, Finance and Accounting, and has been involved in policy-related projects commissioned by the UK’s Department of Trade and Industry (now BEIS), Financial Services Authority (now FCA) and Insolvency Service, the Commonwealth Secretariat, and the World Bank. He served as a member of the European Commission’s Informal Company Law Expert Group from 2014-19. He has recently led a large ESRC-funded multidisciplinary project investigating the adoption of artificial intelligence in legal services.

John has held visiting positions at various institutions including the University of Auckland, the University of Chicago, Columbia Law School, the University of Frankfurt, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Private Law in Hamburg, the University of Pennsylvania Law School, the University of Sydney, and the University of Western Ontario. He is a member of the American Law Institute and an Academic Member of the Chancery Bar Association. In July 2017, he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences.

John has previously held various leadership roles in the Faculty, including serving as the inaugural Academic Director of the MSc in Law and Finance programme and as Associate Dean for Graduate Students (Research).

He says of his appointment:

Having benefited so much from my own time here as a student, I am thrilled to have the opportunity to serve the Oxford Law community in this way. Our Law Faculty is a place where we come together to converse and engage – to persuade, to be challenged, to develop judgement, and to learn from each other. We know of course that today’s students are tomorrow’s lawyers, scholars, policymakers, and judges. So our conversations really matter, and I look forward to engaging with our community both in Oxford and our alumni across the legal world.

Economic and social headwinds make this a challenging time for our us all. Yet it is also a time of many exciting opportunities, and there are many ways in which our Faculty can make a real contribution. I am especially fortunate to be able to start from, and seek to build upon, the extraordinary achievements of our current Dean, Professor Mindy Chen-Wishart. She began by steering us, wisely and tirelessly, through the greatest crisis of our professional careers. She has since spearheaded transformative changes to our administrative capacity and structures and to our equality, diversity, and inclusiveness.

So I begin with enormous gratitude, and look forward with much hope, to working with our community in the coming years.

John succeeds Mindy Chen-Wishart as Dean and his tenure will begin on 1 October 2023.