John George Woodroffe was born on 15 December 1865 in Calcutta, the son of an English barrister practicing in British India. He was educated at Oxford and trained as a barrister at the Inner Temple in London before returning to India, where he built a substantial legal career: advocate at the Calcutta High Court from 1890, standing counsel to the Government of India, and eventually a Puisne Judge of the High Court of Calcutta from 1904 to 1922, briefly serving as officiating chief justice of Bengal in 1915. He was knighted for this legal career.
Alongside his judicial work, Woodroffe developed a serious scholarly interest in Sanskrit and in the Hindu tantric texts and practices of Bengal, an interest that deepened through his contact with Bengali pandits and practitioners. After retiring from the bench in 1922 he returned to England, where he served as reader in Indian Law at Oxford from 1923 to 1930. He died on 16 January 1936 in Beausoleil, in the south of France, at seventy.
His scholarship depended heavily on collaboration with Bengali pandits, above all Atal Bihari Ghosh, a practicing tantric initiate and manuscript collector whose knowledge of primary texts and living practice Woodroffe relied on throughout his Avalon publications, though Ghosh's own contribution went largely uncredited on the title pages in the convention of the time. Beyond his tantric scholarship, Woodroffe also wrote and lectured on Indian legal subjects, including a set of Tagore Law Lectures on Indian company law delivered at the University of Calcutta, reflecting the same seriousness he brought to law as to his esoteric research.