Costas Douzinas LLB (Athens) LLM PhD (London) is a Professor of Law and Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.

Costas joined the Department in 1992 and was Head of Department from 1996 to 2002. Costas was educated in Athens during the Colonels’ dictatorship where he joined the student resistance. He left Greece in 1974 and continued his studies in London, where he received his Master’s in Law and PhD degrees from LSE and, in Strasbourg, where he received the degree for teachers of Human Rights. He taught at Middlesex, Lancaster and Birkbeck where he was appointed in 1992 as a member of the team which established the Birkbeck School of Law.

Costas has argued that the human rights as enacted in law do nothing to tie ethics to justice. As he expressed it in The End of Human Rights (2000), “a law without justice is a body without a soul and a legal education that teaches rules without spirit is intellectually barren and morally bankrupt”.