Neville Brown was born in 1923. He attended Wolverhampton Grammar School, and won a scholarship to study Classics at Pembroke College in 1941. However, he was immediately called up for service, and worked as a radar mechanic in the Royal Air Force until the end of the war when he returned to Cambridge and received a double first in Classics and Law in 1948. He became a solicitor as well as Professor Emeritus of Comparative Law at the University of Birmingham.