Professor Chris Thornhill

• 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 Cátedra 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 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 Romania and Ireland. When not working, he likes to listen to classical music, to visit art galleries and to go hiking (especially in France).   

He teaches UK Public Law and comparative constitutional law.

Chris has supervised PhDs inter alia on: Constitutional Reform in Kenya; Constitutional Reform in Egypt; 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; International Law and Anti-Corruption Policies in Brazil; Transnational Environmental Law in South America; Legal Pluralism in China; Administrative Law in Uzbekistan. He welcomes PhD applications from researchers working in any area of legal sociology and/or comparative constitutional law.

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

Most of Chris’s 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. He is currently completing a book on legal reform in Central Asia (University of California Press, forthcoming 2025).