Born in
Bridge of Weir,
Renfrewshire,
Scotland in 1956, and educated at
Queen's University, Canada, and at
Nuffield College, Oxford, he completed his dissertation—which culminated in a book,
The Authority of the State—under professors
Charles Taylor and later
Joseph Raz. Like Raz, he has been an expositor and defender of the tradition of
legal positivism and wrote the introduction and new supplementary materials for the third edition of
H.L.A. Hart's classic work
The Concept of Law. In 2006, Green was elected to the Professorship of Philosophy of Law at
Oxford University, which includes a Fellowship at
Balliol College. The Professorship, a new statutory chair, was created upon the retirement of Joseph Raz from his personal Chair, also at Balliol. It is one of just two statutory professorships in
jurisprudence at Oxford, the other being held by
Ruth Chang. In 2010, the distinguished lawyer, Philip Gordon, endowed the Balliol fellowship, and Green became the first Pauline and Max Gordon Fellow at Balliol. At the same time, Green took up a part-time appointment as Professor and Distinguished University Fellow in the Philosophy of Law at Queen's University. Prior to this, Green taught for most of his career at
Osgoode Hall Law School of
York University, in Toronto. He has also taught at
Lincoln College, Oxford, at
Boalt Hall Law School at the
University of California, Berkeley; at the
University of Chicago Law School, and was for several years a Regular Visiting Professor at the
University of Texas at Austin law school. He has been a visiting fellow at
Columbia University's Center for Law and Philosophy, and a Hauser Global Faculty member at
New York University School of Law. He is founding co-editor (with
Brian Leiter) of
Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law. With the late
John Gardner and Timothy Endicott, he is also co-editor of the book series, Oxford Legal Philosophy. Green and 30 other academics signed a public letter in the Sunday Times published on June 16, 2019 entitled “Stonewall is stifling academia”. The letter claims that Stonewall are stifling academic progress by restricting academic freedom in the classroom. Green himself is on the record as a defender of the position that trans people should be addressed by the pronouns of their choice. Green is a
Freemason and a member of the
Apollo University Lodge. ==Publications==