About

This profile was current as of 2022, when he was part of the on-campus Kellogg community.

Francisco J. Urbina joined the Law School in December 2022 and became a Kellogg faculty fellow in 2023. Urbina was a visiting fellow at the Kellogg Institute and a concurrent visiting professor at the University of Notre Dame Law School during the spring of 2022. His primary areas of work are human rights, jurisprudence, and constitutional law. Previously he was an assistant professor at the Faculty of Law of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and a fellow of the Center for International Studies at that same university. 

Urbina's work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, the Law Quarterly Review, the American Journal of Jurisprudence, and the International Journal of Constitutional Law. He is the author of A Critique of Proportionality and Balancing (Cambridge University Press 2017) and the co-author of Legislated Rights: Securing Human Rights through Legislation (Cambridge University Press 2018). His work has been cited by the European Court of Human Rights (dissenting opinion), the Supreme Court of Canada (concurrent reasons), the Court of Appeals of Ontario, and the Australian Law Reform Commission.

Between 2019 and 2021, he served as a human rights advisor to the Mission of Chile to the Organization of American States and has represented the State of Chile in cases before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.  

Urbina graduated summa cum laude from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in 2007 (recipient of Carlos Casanueva Prize) and earned a Masters in Legal Studies and a Doctorate in Law from the University of Oxford in 2013.