Dr. R. John Pritchard is a professional historian as well as a lawyer.

Following his B.A. in History at the University of California, John Pritchard came to Britain in the late 1960s and took his M.A. & Ph.D ( Econ.) degrees in International History at the London School of Economics. In the mid-1980s he completed professional management training which served him well in handling all aspects of commercial management as a management consultant, company secretary, managing director and company chairman. He earned his LLB (Law) at the University of Kent at Canterbury, and took the Bar Vocational Course at the Inns of Court School of Law in London.

Between 1986-90, John was founding Director & Company Secretary of Integrated Dictionary Systems Ltd., which marketed intensive Japanese language courses developed in association with the Centre of Japanese Studies at Sheffield University. Other IDS business services included commercial translations, Japanese typesetting & word processing. In this niche market IDS published & marketed distance-learning packages which drew upon a unique series of eight textbooks and interlocking Japanese-English dictionaries using advanced computer-based natural language grammar processing techniques (which gave the company its name).

On leaving IDS, John resumed his full-time academic career, first as a Lecturer in History at the University of Kent at Canterbury and Fellow in War Studies at Kings College, London, 1990-93, then as a Simon Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, 1993-94. He subsequently accepted a Research Fellowship at the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies at St. Antony's College, Oxford (where he also organised an international conference on War Crimes and Memory during the commemorations marking the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Pacific War). Up to the mid-1990s he also undertook lecture tours and other speaking engagements as an historian in Japan, Singapore, Australia and the United States.

John subsequently became the founding Director of an international foundation in New York concerned with publications and programmes on international criminal law, international human rights and related subjects (in which capacity he commissioned other world-class experts to publish multi-volume works on such topics as the War Crimes Trials of the First World War, the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau during the Second World War, the Rwandan National Genocide Trials, and the Cambodian Genocide). Over the past five years, he has participated in a number of expert conferences concerned with the drafting of the statute of the International Criminal Court and with rolling back impunity for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Latin America and elsewhere. He has been an historical consultant on documentary feature films since the early 1980s, and he frequently contributes to radio and television news & current affairs programmes.

Over the past thirty years, he also has published or contributed to scores of books & articles on history & law. His first book, The Reichstag Fire: Ashes of Democracy, published while he was still a first-year doctoral student in 1971, rapidly became a bestseller. Between 1973-87, he compiled & annotated The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Complete Transcripts of the Proceedings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, a 22-volume series published in 1981 together with a companion five volume Index & Guide completed in 1987. His PhD thesis, Far Eastern Influences on British Strategy towards the Great Powers, 1937-39 was selected for publication in a series of Outstanding Theses from the London School of Economics in 1989 and won praise as a work of prodigious scholarship.

His 1,300-page blockbuster Total War: Causes & Courses of the Second World War, co-authored with Peter Calvocoressi and the late Guy Wint, was published by Viking & Penguin Books in 1989 (updated & reissued, 1995), was recently re-issued as The Penguin History of the Second World War, its publisher's flagship title on its subject. This work has received international acclaim from many leading reviewers as 'the best single volume history of the Second World War', and it has enjoyed brisk sales in a two-volume Japanese translation.

John is universally acknowledged to have unsurpassed expertise on a broad range of the war crimes trials that followed the Second World War. His most recent work has been a new, annotated 124-volume collection on the Tokyo Trial (including 113 volumes of facsimile materials, ten volumes of finding aids and an authoritative volume of commentary on the history and jurisprudence of that Tribunal). Foremost among his forthcoming works is The British War Crimes Trials in the Far East, 1946-1948, a 98 volume collection comprising the complete records of 165 war crimes trials to be published together with a set of finding aids and a major collection of more than 70 essays focusing upon legal, historical & sociological aspects of those proceedings, and he has set in train a similar project to publish all extant records of the Allied Trials of Italian War Criminals. He has also been commissioned to write a textbook on the History and Jurisprudence of the Law of Armed Conflict, The Misconduct of War & The Rule of Law. He has co-edited a forthcoming three-volume work entitled International Humanitarian Law: Origins, Challenges & Prospects, to which he also contributed a pioneering study on the first modern national and international trials for war crimes and crimes against humanity which were conducted on Crete in 1898 on the eve of the Hague Conference of 1899, and he has recently published other important essays relating to British and Canadian war crimes trials following the Second World War. For many years he also has undertaken a considerable amount of benevolent activity for war victims and their families