Francisco J. Urbina

Associate Professor of Law

Office: 2156 Eck Hall of Law
Phone: 574-631-6255
Email: furbinam@nd.edu
Staff Assistant: Claire Shely
CV: View

Francisco J. Urbina joined the Law School in December 2022. His primary areas of work are human rights, comparative constitutional law, and jurisprudence, devoting particular attention to regional systems of protection of human rights, the limitation of human and constitutional rights, constitutionalism and democracy, and the role of courts and legislatures in securing human rights and democratic government.

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 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.

Prior to joining Notre Dame, he taught at Pontificia Universidad Católica, in Chile. 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 the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. His work has been cited at the European Court of Human Rights (S.J.P. and E.S. v. Sweden, dissenting opinion by Judge Serghides), the Supreme Court of Canada (R. v. Chouhan, concurrent reasons by Justice Rowe), the Court of Appeals of Ontario (Bracken v. Niagara Parks Police, and R. v. Sharma, dissenting opinion by Justice Miller) and the Australian Law Reform Commission (Traditional Rights and Freedoms—Encroachments by Commonwealth Laws).

He 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.