Professor John Child

• PhD, University of Birmingham

John has been at Birmingham since 2018; becoming a Professor of Criminal Law in 2022. Prior to this, John held posts at Sussex Law School (2013-2018); Oxford Brookes Law School (2010-13); and the Criminal Law Team at the Law Commission for England and Wales (2007-8). John has held visiting positions at Boston University; the University of Birmingham; as well as the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in Freiburg. John is dyslexic (so please excuse the 'live' spelling), and grew up in a working-class family in Norfolk. 

John specialises in Criminal Law, convening and/or teaching crime related modules at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

John is interested in doctoral candidates in criminal law doctrine and theory, comparative criminal law, and/or criminal law and neuroscience.John's previous successful doctoral students include:
* Rachel Gimson, ‘Captured Red Handed: The Impact of Social Media on the Evolving Concepts of the Criminal Defendant and the Presumption of Innocence’ - Completed in 2016;
* Stavros Demetriou, 'Anti-Social Behaviour and Civil Preventive Measures: Creating Localised Criminal Codes?' - Completed in 2017;
* Nicholas Sinclair-House, ‘Sentencing Intoxicated Defendants’ - Completed in 2018.
* Christos Papachristopoulos, 'Prisons in Europe, Europe in Prisons' - Completed in 2024
* Polly Hernandez, 'The Relevance of Relevance' - Completed in 2025
* Hakan Donmez , 'Understanding 'Corporate' 'Criminal' 'Liability' through a Tripartite Framework and Why it Matters' - Completed in 2025

Find out more - our PhD Law  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

John’s research interests centre on criminal law theory, and particularly the internal structuring of offences and defences within the general part, where he has published widely. 

Across a range of criminal law topics, John's research aims to bridge the divide between conceptual debate and doctrinal application; and to demonstrate how a greater theoretical understanding of the law can be translated into an effective counter to the global expansion of criminal proscriptions (ie, inappropriate or over-criminalisation). This includes work challenging whether certain wrongs are deserving of criminalisation (eg, his work on prior-fault; complicity; inchoate offences; etc), as well as defending minimum doctrinal requirements within the law from philosophical critique (eg, his work on the voluntary act requirement). John is regularly engaged in collaborative and interdisciplinary projects that allow him to gain different insights into a legal problem, as well as to produce more robust recommendations for legal reform. See Problem Solving in the Criminal Law.

• Society of Legal Scholars (SLS) Subject Section Convenor – Criminal Justice
• Co-Director of the Criminal Law Reform Now Network
• Academic Member of Sussex Addiction Research & Intervention Centre
• External Examiner at UCL & UCLan