As a Rhodes Scholar, she completed a PhD (D.Phil) at Balliol College, Oxford under the supervision of Malcolm Bowie.
Brown then became a private equity lawyer in the City of London.
Trained at Slaughter and May, Brown worked as an associate successively at Slaughter and May and then became an associate, and later Counsel, in the London office of US law firm Milbank, Tweed, Hadley and McCloy.
She then became a partner of the US law firm Paul Hastings, LLP.
She was subsequently appointed to a Lectureship in Art History at Tilburg University before moving to Loughborough.