Justina Uriburu is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in International Law at the University of Manchester and Co-Director of the Manchester International Law Centre (MILC). She is currently on research leave, supported by a two-year grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation. She is also Co-Editor of EJIL: Talk!, the blog of the European Journal of International Law.

Justina is an international law scholar whose work combines doctrinal, historical, and theoretical approaches to international dispute settlement and international legal ordering. 

Her first research strand examines the development and practice of international dispute settlement. She has written on overlooked histories of international dispute settlement, the normative commitments underpinning diversity agendas in international tribunals, and the role of adjudication and collective security as mechanisms for organising peace. Her book project examines the ideals behind inter-state dispute settlement treaties and the conditions that determine their use, grounded in the experience of the Americas. In parallel, she is exploring an emerging area: the role of law firms in international litigation and how legal expertise shapes states’ decisions about where and how to pursue disputes.

Her second research strand focuses on regional legal orders and agency in the Global South, with particular attention to the Americas. She has written on the history of regional organisation in the Americas, the thinking of semi-peripheral jurists, and how and why American actors have promoted and resisted international criminal justice. She is currently writing on evolving forms of US intervention and the responses of Latin American and Caribbean states. She is also co-editing a special issue of the International Journal of Constitutional Law on encounters between the global and the local in Latin America, an inquiry into how international law lands on the ground and with what consequences.

Her work has been published in leading journals, including the American Journal of International Law, the European Journal of International Law, the Journal of the History of International Law, the Leiden Journal of International Law, and the London Review of International Law. She also writes shorter interventions on current developments in blogs, such as EJIL: Talk!, Verfassungsblog, and Opinio Juris.

Justina combines academic expertise with first-hand experience in international adjudication. She works as a consultant in international law and is involved in cases before the International Court of Justice. She began her legal career in Buenos Aires at the Office of Crimes against Humanity, advising federal prosecutors on international criminal law in the domestic prosecution of crimes committed during Argentina’s dictatorship (1976–1983), and later served as Law Clerk to the Office of the Attorney General, drafting legal opinions on public interest cases before the Supreme Court of Argentina.

Justina was trained in Argentina, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Switzerland. She holds a law degree from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and an LLM in International Law from University College London, where she studied as a Chevening Scholar. She received her PhD in International Law summa cum laude from the Geneva Graduate Institute, where her thesis was awarded a special distinction by the examining committee, and held a Gallatin Fellowship as a Visiting Scholar at American University. She subsequently held a Max Weber Fellowship at the European University Institute in Florence.

She sits on the Executive Board of the European Journal of International Law and the Editorial Board of the Latin American and Caribbean Journal of International Law, and actively collaborates with the Latin American Society of International Law.