Julen Etxabe

Julen Etxabe is Canada Research Chair in Jurisprudence and Human Rights and joined Allard Law as Assistant Professor in July of 2019. His current research combines legal and literary theory to identify a new model of dialogical judgment emerging in the area of human rights, which is transforming inherited notions of reasoning, rights, authority, and law in the post-national and diverse societies of the 21st century.

Grounded on cultural and humanistic approaches to law, Etxabe is the author of The Experience of Tragic Judgment (Routledge, 2013) and has edited Cultural History of Law in Antiquity (Bloomsbury, 2019). He is also the co-editor of Rancière and Law (Routledge, 2018) and Living in a Law Transformed: Encounters with the Works of James Boyd White (Michigan, 2014). From 2012 to 2017 he was editor-in-chief of No-Foundations: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Law and Justice and is a member of the editorial committee of Law & Humanities. He is one of the founders of the Canadian Network of Law & Humanities.

Prior to joining the Peter A. Allard School of Law, Professor Etxabe was a Core Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies and postdoctoral researcher at the Center of Excellence in Foundations of European Law of the University of Helsinki. In addition, he has been a visiting researcher at Reed College (Portland, OR), the Australian National University College of Law, the School of Law and Justice at Southern Cross University in Australia, and Facultés Universitaires Saint Louis in Brussels. He has taught both graduate seminars and undergraduate courses at the University of Michigan and the University of Helsinki and supervises doctoral students in several areas of law and interdisciplinary studies including cultural legal studies, law & film, and critical legal theory.

Professor Etxabe has been a recipient of numerous fellowships, such as the Fulbright Fellowship to pursue doctoral studies at the University of Michigan Law School and the Kone Foundation Research Grant.

Research and Publications

 To learn more about my research, please visit my PURE Research profile. You can also access my publications on the following sites: 

• UBC Library Faculty Publications Database
• Academia.edu
• HeinOnline

• Comparative and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Legal Theory
• Jurisprudence and Critical Perspectives 
• Judicial Criticism
• International HR Law
• International Law

Books

• The Experience of Tragic Judgment (Routledge, 2013).
• Cultural History of Law in Antiquity (Bloomsbury, 2019) (editor).
• Rancière and Law (Routledge, 2018) (co-edited with Mónica López Lerma).
• Living in a Law Transformed: Encounters with the Works of James Boyd White (Michigan Publishing, 2014) (co-edited with Gary Watt).

Selected Articles and Chapters

• “Pluralizing Judicial Authority: The Double-Voiced Opinion,” in T. Peters, K. Crawley & T. Giddens, The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Legal Studies (Routledge, 2024) 285-299.
• “Borrowed Words and Judicial Gestalt: A Dialogical Reading of Hirst, the ECtHR and Prisoner Voting Rights” (2024) 24:1 Human Rights Law Review, 1-20.
• “A Dialogical Model of Human Rights Adjudication” (2023) 21:4 International Journal of Constitutional Law, 1011-1040.
• “The Dialogical Language of Law” (2022) Osgoode Hall Law Journal 59:2, 429-515.
• “Law as Politics: Four Relations” (2020) Law, Culture & the Humanities 16:1, 24-41.
• “Writing a Cultural History of Law in Antiquity: An Introduction,” in J. Etxabe, ed, Cultural History of Law in Antiquity (Bloomsbury, 2019) 1-18.
• “Jacques Rancière and the Dramaturgy of Law,” in M. López Lerma & J. Etxabe, eds, Rancière and Law (Routledge, 2018) 17-42.
• “It’s not All about ‘Pretty’: Human Rights Adjudication in a Life and Death Situation,” in J. Etxabe & G. Watt, eds, Living in a Law Transformed: Encounters with the Works of James Boyd White (Michigan Publishing, 2014), 68-88.
• “Rhetoric Constitution, (Im)Possible Constitution: the ‘Nation’ in the Proposal of the Cadiz Constitution and in the Judgment about the Statute of Autonomy for Catalunya” (originally in Spanish) (2014), Política Común 6, np.
• “Tragic Incommensurability and Legal Judgment,” (2011) Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 24:1, 55-78.
• “What do the Poets Know about Democracy: A Case Study in Law and Literature,” in Law and Method: Interdisciplinary Research into Law, B. Van Klink and S. Taekema eds. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011) 341-354.
• “The Legal Universe after Robert Cover” (2010) Law & Humanities 4:1, 115-147.
• “Antigone’s Nomos” (2009) Animus: The Canadian Journal of Philosophy and Humanities 13, 60-73.

For a full list of publications, visit the Law Library Faculty Research Publications Database.