Professor Paul Rock is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the LSE. He took his first degree at the LSE and then a D.Phil. at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. He has been a Visiting Professor at a number of universities in North America, including the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University; a Visiting Scholar at the Ministry of the Solicitor General of Canada; a Fellow of the Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California; and a resident at the Rockefeller Foundation Centre at the Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra in 2005.  In 2016 he was a visiting professor at the University of Macau where he will return in 2017.  

His interests focus on the development of criminal justice policies, particularly for victims of crime, but he has also published articles on criminological theory and the history of crime.  He has just completed the first two volumes of the official history of criminal justice.

In 2001-2002, he was key expert for the European Community's Phare Horizontal Programme, reporting on the treatment of victims and witnesses in the ten accession states. He was formerly editor of the British Journal of Sociology and review editor of the British Journal of Criminology, and was a co-founder and member of the editorial board of Oxford University Press's Clarendon Criminology Series. With Nicole Rafter, he co-edits the Compact Criminology series published by Sage.

Selected Publications

The Social World of an English Crown Court (1993, Clarendon Press)

Reconstructing a Women's Prison (1996, Clarendon Press)

After Homicide: Practical and Political Responses to Bereavement (1998, Clarendon Press)

(with David Downes) Understanding Deviance (seventh edition 2007, Canadian edition 2009, Oxford University Press)

Constructing Victims' Rights (September 2004, Clarendon Press).