After 15 years working in Law Faculties in Universities in Ghana and Nigeria, Gordon Woodman became a lecturer in this School in 1976. He teaches Land Law at undergraduate and GDLS levels, and supervises a number of postgraduate research students.

He studies and writes about law in Africa generally, and is author of Customary Land Law in the Ghanaian Courts (Ghana Universities Press, 1996), co-editor with A O Obilade of African Law and Legal Theory (Dartmouth, 1995), and co-editor with Ulrike Wanitzek and Harald Sippel of Local Land Law and Globalization: A comparative study of peri-urban areas in Benin, Ghana and Tanzania (LIT, 2004).

He has made a study of customary laws generally in the modern world, in addition to those in African countries, and related issues in legal theory concerning the nature of customary law and the theory of legal pluralism. He was President of the Commission on Folk Law and Legal Pluralism from 1984-1990, and has been Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law since 1994. He has edited and contributed to a number of books in these fields, including People's Law and State Law (Foris, 1985, edited with Antony Allot), Indigenous Law and the State (Foris, 1988, edited with Bradford W Morse), Between Kinship and the State: Social Security and Law in Developing Countries (Foris, 1988, edited with Franz von Benda-Beckmann and others), and Law and Religion in Multicultural Societies (DJØF Publishing, 2008, edited with Rubya Mehdi and others).

His other, related area of research and writing is the reception, application and adaptation of the common law in Commonwealth countries, on which he has also written articles. He has been a consultant for governments, aid agencies, NGOs and the World Bank, and an expert witness in court proceedings which involve issues of African law. He is writing a book on customary law and legal theory. For his work on law in Africa he has been awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Bayreuth (Germany) and the University of Ghana.

Recent Publications:

• Local Land Law and Globalization: A comparative study of peri-urban areas in Benin, Ghana and Tanzania, LIT Verlag, 2004 (co-edited).
• Law and Religion in Multicultural Societies, DJØF Publishing, 2008 (co-edited).
• Risk and the Law, Abingdon: Routledge (co-edited).
• ‚From Alien Intruder to Nation’s Monarch to International Agent: The Changing Roles of the African State in the Realm of Law’, in Reinhard Zimmermann (ed.), Globalisierung und Entstaatlichung des Rechts – Teilband 2: Nichtstaatliches Privatrecht: Geltung und Genese, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2008, 187-204.
• ‘The Culture Defence in English Common Law: The Potential for Development”, in Marie-Claire Foblets and Alison Dundes Renteln (eds.), Multicultural Jurisprudence:  Comparative Perspectives on the Cultural Defense, Oxford and Portland Oregon: Hart Publishing, 2009, 7-34.
• ‘Can There Be Maps Of Law?”, in Franz von Benda-Beckmann, Keebet von Benda-Beckmann and Anne Griffiths (eds.), Spatialising Law: An Anthropological Geography of Law in Society, Farnham Britain and Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2009 195-218 (co-author).
• ‘The Challenge of African Customary Laws to English Legal Culture’, in Ralph Grillo, Roger Ballard, Alessandro Ferrari, André J. Hoekema, Marcel Maussen and Prakash Shah (eds.), Legal Practice and Cultural Diversity, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009, 135-150.