Tessa Blackstone served as a master at Birkbeck from 1987-1997 and reinstated the teaching of law at Birkbeck by inaugurating the department (now School of Law).  

Baroness Blackstone of Stoke Newington, a Labour peer and former Minister of State for both Education and Culture, began her academic career at the London School of Economics.  In 1975 she joined the Central Policy Review Staff, an independent unit within the Cabinet Office, before returning to academia as Professor of Educational Administration at the Institute of Education. 

This was followed by a post as Deputy Education Officer for the Inner London Education Authority, before becoming Master of Birkbeck in 1987. Her decade of leadership at Birkbeck ended when she took up an appointment with the new Labour government in 1997. She returned once again to academic life as the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Greenwich in 2004, retiring in 2011.