Professor Simon F Deakin

Simon Deakin is a Professor of Law at the University of Cambridge. He specializes in labour law, private law, company law and EU law, and he contributes regularly to the fields of law and economics, law and development, and empirical legal studies. He is Director of the Centre for Business Research and a Fellow of Peterhouse. Following undergraduate studies in Law at Cambridge, he completed a Ph.D. in labour law under the joint supervision of Brian Napier (Faculty of Law) and Frank Wilkinson (Department of Applied Economics). He took up his first full-time lecturing post at Queen Mary College, University of London, in 1987, after a year as a Bigelow Fellow at the University of Chicago, and was appointed to a lectureship in the Cambridge Law Faculty in 1990. He was a visiting fellow at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme Ange Guépin, Nantes, in 1993 and 1995, and the Centre for Employment and Labour Relations Law, University of Melbourne, in 1996. In 2001 he became Robert Monks Professor of Corporate Governance in the Judge Business School at Cambridge. He returned to the Cambridge Law Faculty as a Professor of Law in 2006. He has given the ILO Social Policy Lectures (Budapest 2002), the Tanner Lectures (Oxford, 2008), the Mike Larkin Memorial Lecture (Cape Town, 2009), the V.V. Giri Memorial Lecture (New Delhi, 2013), and the Innis Christie Lecture (Dalhousie, 2015). In 2003 and 2008 he was a Visiting Professor of Law at Columbia University and in 2004 a visiting fellow in the Department of Law, European University Institute, Florence. Between 2004 and 2016 he was Omron visiting fellow at Doshisha University, Kyoto. In 2012-13 he was Francqui Visiting Professor at the University of Antwerp. His books include Markesinis and Deakin's Tort Law (8th. ed. 2019, with Zoe Adams), Deakin and Morris' Labour Law (7th. ed. 2021, with Zoe Adams, Catherine Barnard and Sarah Fraser Butlin), The Law of the Labour Market: Industrialization, Employment, and Legal Evolution (2005, with Frank Wilkinson), and Hedge Fund Activism in Japan: The Limits of Shareholder Primacy (2012, with John Buchanan and Dominic Chai). He is editor in chief of the Industrial Law Journal and a member of the editorial board of the the Cambridge Journal of Economics. He was elected to a Fellowship of the British Academy in 2005 and in 2012 was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the Catholic University of Louvain. He is a recipient of the ECGI and Allen & Overy prizes for corporate governance research.