Paul Vinogradoff was born in 1854 near Moscow, Russia in Kostroma. Receiving his doctorate from the University of Moscow in 1884, he was appointed a professor there and was active in Russian educational reform. When university officials began curtailing students' freedom of expression, he resigned his post and went to England in 1902.

In 1903 Vinogradoff became a professor of jurisprudence at the University of Oxford. He had already studied and published on early English history before leaving Russia, and many have considered Villeinage in England (1892, originally published in Russian in 1887) his most significant work. In that volume he argued that Anglo-Norman manor society developed not from serfdom but from Anglo-Saxon free villages. Other publications by Vinogradoff include The Growth of the Manor (1905) and English Society in the Eleventh Century (1908). "Outlines in Historical Jurisprudence" was incomplete at his death in 1925.

[Information retrieved from "Sir Paul Gavrilovitch Vinogradoff," Encyclopaedia Brittanica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Paul-Gavrilovitch-Vinogradoff, accessed March 10, 2020.]