Dr Raul Sanchez Urribarri is Associate Dean (Academic and International Partnerships) at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and Senior Lecturer in Crime, Justice and Legal Studies at the Department of Social Inquiry, La Trobe University. He is also the current Director of La Trobe's Philippines Australia Forum (PAF La Trobe).
Dr Sanchez Urribarri has a strong interest in the internationalisation of higher education, particularly on strategy, partnership building, international mobility and intercultural teaching. He is the Deputy Convener of the Teaching and Learning Network of the International Education Association of Australia (IEAA), and Vice-President of the U.S. based Consortium for Undergraduate Law and Justice Programs (CULJP). He is also a co-editor at Thesis Eleven Journal (SAGE), and past Chair of the Section on Venezuelan Studies at the Latin American Studies Association (LASA).
Dr Sanchez Urribarri holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of South Carolina, a Master of Laws (LLM) from Cambridge University and a Law degree from Universidad Catolica Andres Bello (Caracas, Venezuela). His research focuses on constitutionalism, judicial politics, and the rule of law in comparative perspective, with an emphasis on contexts of democratic deterioration. His work on Venezuela as a case study has chronicled and analysed the country's decline of democracy, and the different roles legal institutions have fulfilled over time in Venezuela's shifting socio-political context.
Dr Sanchez Urribarri's research has been published in a variety of high-quality academic outlets, such as The Journal of Politics, Law and Social Inquiry, the Annual Review of Law and Social Sciences, International Political Science Review, the Hague Journal on the Rule of Law and Latin American Research Review. He has contributed comment to the media in Australia and internationally, including the ABC, BBC, Channel 10, SBS and the Voice of America, among others.
Dr Sanchez Urribarri 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. Prior to working at La Trobe, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Tulane University’s Department of Political Science (New Orleans, LA), and a Non-Resident Fellow at Tulane’s Center for Inter-American Policy Research (CIPR).