A Hoosier by upbringing, Bob Goodin took his DPhil in Politics at Oxford in 1975. He taught Government at the University of Essex throughout the 1980s. He came to the Australian National University in 1989, where he is now a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy. Goodin is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He gave the Dewey Lecture on Law and Philosophy (University of Chicago Law School, 2008), the Edmund Burke lecture in Philosophy (Trinity College, Dublin, 2009), the Lee Lecture on Political Science and Government (All Souls College, Oxford, 2012) and the Brian Barry Memorial Lecture (LSE, 2013). His coauthored book Discretionary Time won the 2009 Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research, awarded by the International Social Science Council.

Goodin is founding editor of The Journal of Political Philosophy and has served as Associate Editor of Ethics, coeditor of the British Journal of Political Science, General Editor of the 11-volume series of Oxford Handbooks of Political Science for Oxford University Press and the 'Theories of Institutional Design' book series for Cambridge University Press. 

Goodin has co-edited various other major reference books: A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy (Wiley-Blackwell, with Philip Pettit abd Thomas Pogge); Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology (Wiley-Blackwell, with Philip Pettit); and A New Handbook of Political Science (Oxford UP, with Hans-Dieter Klingemann), which was named an Outstanding Academic Book for 1997 by Choice, the official journal of the American Association of College and Research Libraries.