[2] Flanders was born in 1949 in North Massapequa, Long Island, New York and grew up in a middle-class family.

[4] For his college education, he went to Brown University and graduated magna cum laude in 1971 with a major in English.

[3][5][6] During his college years at Brown, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and received a prize for an essay he wrote on the classicism of Henry Fielding in Tom Jones.

[4] In 2004, after eight years of service as a justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court, he resigned from the post and joined Hinckley, Allen & Snyder as a partner.

[8] In 2011, Governor Lincoln Chafee appointed Flanders as the Central Falls Receiver, tasked with addressing the city's financial distress.