John Knox teaches and writes about human rights, environmental protection, and international trade. Much of his scholarly and pro bono work concerns the areas where those fields overlap or conflict. He is currently writing a book on human (and other) environmental rights in international law and, in the last two years, he has advised the UN Human Rights Council, the UN Environment Programme, the World Bank, and the Maldives, a low-lying island state in the Indian Ocean, on the relationship between climate change and human rights law. His co-authored book, Greening NAFTA, analyzes the environmental regime embedded within the North American Free Trade Agreement, and for four years, until 2005, he chaired a national advisory committee to EPA on the NAFTA environmental agreement.

In 2003, John was awarded the Francis Deák Prize, established by the American Society of International Law to honor a younger author who has made a "meritorious contribution to international legal scholarship." His most recent article, on the extraterritorial application of U.S. law, was published in the July 2010 issue of the American Journal of International Law. He is a member scholar of the Center for Progressive Reform and a senior advisor to the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL).

After graduating from Stanford Law School and clerking for Judge Joseph T. Sneed of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, John served as an attorney-adviser at the Department of State. He then spent four years in private practice in Austin, Texas and taught at Penn State for eight years before joining Wake Forest in 2006. He is married to Julie Winterich, who teaches at Guilford College, and they have three daughters, in fourth, seventh, and ninth grade.