Lindsay was appointed Professor of Public Law at the University of Sussex in 2015. Before that, he was a Lecturer and Senior Lecturer at Sheffield (2010–15), a Lecturer at the University of Manchester (2010–15) and the University of East Anglia (2002-2007) He was a tutorial fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science 2001–2002 and a Lecturer at the University of the West Indies (Mona) 1999–2001.

He has held visiting appointments at Australian National University (2005) and the University of Edinburgh (where he was a MacCormick Fellow in 2014). He was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Tasmania, Australia from July–December 2018, where he remains an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Law. .

After studying law at the University of Glasgow, Lindsay proceeded to postgraduate study at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His doctoral research in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics was awarded the Lady Alma Birk prize for outstanding work in pursuance of a PhD. Lindsay has researched widely in the fields of public law and regulation, and the history of public law and public administration (see his research page for more information). He won the Society of Legal Scholars Best Paper Prize 2009 for joint work with T T Arvind on the use of fuzzy-set approaches to comparative legal history.

Lindsay is co-editor of a forthcoming edited collection, Executive Decision-Making and the Courts: Revisiting the Origins of Modern Judicial Review, to be published by Hart in 2021.