2016 Regulatory Studies Development Award winner

From the Standing Group on Regulatory Governance

Professor Julia Black is the winner of the 2016 Standing Group Award for Regulatory Studies Development, which bestows recognition on a senior scholar for outstanding contributions to the development of regulation and governance studies.

Julia is Pro Director for Research and Professor of Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Moreover, she is currently Interim Director of the LSE. She is also an independent member of the Board of the Solicitors Regulation Authority and was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2015.

Julia completed her first degree in Jurisprudence and her DPhil at Oxford University, and joined the Law Department of the LSE in 1994. She has been a visiting fellow at the University of Sydney, All Souls College, Oxford and in 2014 was the Sir Frank Holmes Visiting Professor in Public Policy at the Victoria University, Wellington, NZ. She is also a research associate of the LSE & ESRC Systemic Risk Centre and LSE's Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Regulation (CARR), and co-chairs CARR's Regulators' Forum.

Julia Black has received grants from the British Academy & Leverhulme Trust, the ESRC and the Canadian SSRC. She is General Editor of the Modern Law Review and on the editorial boards of Regulation & Governance and Law & Policy.

Julia has served as an external member on the Education and Training Committee for the Solicitors Regulation Authority in 2013 and joined the SRA Board as an independent member in January 2014. She has been a member of the SRA's Regulatory Risk Committee and currently chairs the SRA's Standards Committee. She has advised policy makers, consumer bodies, law reform bodies and regulators on issues of institutional design and regulatory policy in the UK and overseas over many years.

Julia Black is one of the world's preeminent authorities on regulation, and she has contributed very significantly to the development of socio-legal studies in the field of regulation. Her book Rules and Regulators (Clarendon Press Oxford, 1997) draws attention to the importance of context and community in which rules operate in order to answer the question of 'how to make rules work'. Setting the theory against an empirical study of the formation and use of rules in the financial sector, she demonstrates complex ways in which a rule and community interact. Julia's study emphasizes that ultimate abstract conclusions about rules are not possible, rules must always 'fit' into the community in which they are to function. This study was very innovative study and was really formative for the type of research Julia Black has been pursuing since then, including her very influential work on principles based regulation.

However, her unusually wide-ranging scholarship extends well beyond understanding of the setting and implementation of rules in financial markets. She has significantly enhanced understanding of the role of institutions in regulatory policy, both theoretically and empirically, and also the centrality of procedures and relationships for giving meaning and effect to regulatory governance. Through this strand of work she has built on and developed some of the most influential theoretical strands of the field, including very influential work on the concept of 'decentred regulation' (which set down a path developed by herself and many others on the role of non-state actors and heterarchical instruments in contemporary regulation), her work with Robert Baldwin on 'really responsive regulation' and 'really responsive risk regulation', and significant theoretical contributions to the challenge of managing legitimacy in regulatory regimes. Substantively, from her starting point in financial regulation, she has addressed significant questions also in the areas of biotechnology, the environment and the regulation of consumer markets and many other policy fields.

Overall, Julia has addressed and advanced many and perhaps most of the key areas of contemporary concern in regulatory governance scholarship and has shared her learning extensively both with scholarly and practice communities.

About the award

Focusing on senior scholars and complementing the Giandomenico Majone Prize, the Standing Group Award for Regulatory Studies Development bestows recognition on a senior scholar for outstanding contributions to the development of regulation and governance studies.

This may include promoting a new teaching initiative, opening a new research sub field, delivering crucial publications or making a significant public contribution to the field (i.e., a large dataset, a new RIA technique).

More information on the nomination and selection procedure can be found in the Regulations of the Standing Group Award for Regulatory Studies Development.

The previous winners of the Award are:

• 2016: Julia Black
• 2014: David Levi-Faur

For the full list of previous prize winners, please see here.