Raul Sanchez Urribarri is Associate Dean (Academic and International Partnerships) at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and a Senior Lecturer in Crime, Justice and Legal Studies at the Department of Social Inquiry, La Trobe University.
He holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of South Carolina, an LLM from Cambridge University and a Law degree (Cum Laude) from Universidad Catolica Andres Bello (Caracas). His research focuses on constitutionalism, judicial politics, and the rule of law in comparative perspective, with an emphasis on contexts of democratic deterioration. His research on Venezuela has chronicled and analysed the decline of democracy in this country, and has explored the different roles legal institutions have fulfilled over time in a shifting context.
Prior to working at La Trobe, Dr Sanchez Urribarri was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Tulane University’s Department of Political Science (New Orleans, LA), and is a Non-Resident Fellow at Tulane’s Center for Inter-American Policy Research (CIPR). He has held visiting appointments at several prestigious institutions, including the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Law and Society; the American Bar Foundation (Chicago, IL); the University of Copenhagen’s iCourts Institute, and the Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law.
Dr Sanchez Urribarri provides advisory services in democratization, justice reform and rule of law issues, with an emphasis on Latin America. His work has been published in a variety of high-quality outlets, including The Journal of Politics, Law and Social Inquiry, the Annual Review of Law and Social Sciences, International Political Science Review, and the Hague Journal on the Rule of Law, Latin American Research Review, among others. He is co-editor at Thesis Eleven (SAGE), and a past Chair of the Section on Venezuelan Studies at the Latin American Studies Association (LASA).
Dr Sanchez Urribarri also has a strong interest in the internationalisation of higher education, particularly on international mobility and intercultural teaching. He is the current Vice-President of the Board of the Consortium on Undergraduate Law and Justice Program (CULJP). He also leads a research-intensive international study tour to New Orleans and Mississippi, focused on reflective experiential learning.
