An American by birth and Hoosier by upbringing, Bob Goodin took his D.Phil. in Politics at Oxford in 1975. He spent a decade teaching Government at the University of Essex before moving in 1989 to the Australian National University in 1989 and he retured there on leave from ANU 2011-2014. Upon retirement from ANU in 2021, he was Distinguished Professor jointly of Philosophy and of Social & Political Theory in the Research School of Social Sciences. Goodin was elected as 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 at the University of Chicago Law School (2008), the Edmund Burke lecture at Trinity College, Dublin (2009) and the Brian Barry Memorial Lecture at LSE (2013).

Goodin was awarded the 2022 Skytte Prize in Political Science (sometimes referred to as 'the Nobel Prize of political science'). The University of Turku in Finland awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2021. ANU awarded him the 2916 Peter Baume Chancellor's Award, the most prestigious award conferred on an academic member of staff.  Goodin's 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, having served as Co-editor of the British Journal of Political Science on two occasions and as an Associate Editor of Ethics for over a decade. He was General Editor of the 11-volume series of Oxford Handbooks of Political Science for Oxford University Press; he himself co-edited two volumes in that series (Public Policy, with Michael Moran and Martin Rein; Contextual Political Analysis, with Charles Tilly; both 2006) and edited a final one-volume consolidation volume (The Oxford Handbook of Political Science, 2009). Goodin was also founding Editor of a series of books on 'Theories of Institutional Design' for Cambridge University Press and, with James Fishkin, of the Philosophy, Politics & Society series founded by the late Peter Laslett in 1956. Goodin has coedited various other major reference books: A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy (Wiley-Blackwell, 1st edn co-edited with Philip Pettit, 1993; 2nd edn co-edited with Pettit and Thomas Pogge, 2007); Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology (Wiley-Blackwell, 1st edn, 2nd edn 2006, both co-edited with Philip Pettit); and A New Handbook of Political Science (Oxford UP, 1996, co-edited with Hans-Dieter Klingemann), named an Outstanding Academic Book for 1997 by Choice, the official journal of the American Association of College and Research Libraries.