Fernando Javier Muñoz León, PhD

His area of research is the history of law in colonial and republican Chile, using intellectual and institutional history as methodological approaches. His current research focuses on the history of legal education in Chile, Latin America, and the wider Western world during the long 19th century.

Associate Professor and Researcher at the History Department of Universidad San Sebastián. He holds a JSD from Yale Law School and a Ph.D. in History from Universidad de Chile. Has received fellowships from the Fulbright (2007) and Humboldt (2016) foundations. Researcher in charge of four Fondecyt projects (2012-2015; 2018-2021; 2021-2023; 2024-2027). He has spent time as a research fellow at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris (2014), the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton (2015), the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences in Paris (2016), the Faculty of Law of the University of Bologna (2016), and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law in Heidelberg (2016). He is the author of Introducción a la Historia del Derecho Chileno. Constitución, legalidad y cultura jurídica, siglos XVI a XX (Der, Santiago, 2021) and Historia General del Derecho. Legalidad y cultura jurídica en la tradición occidental (Tirant lo Blanch, Valencia, 2020), as well as various academic articles published in journals such as Anuario de Derecho Constitucional Latinoamericano, Revista Chilena de Derecho, German Law Journal, Political Theology, Revista Chilena de Derecho y Tecnología, Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, among others.

At Universidad San Sebastián he has taught History of Republican Chile I, History of Ideas and Constitutional History of Chile, among others, emphasizing the role that intellectuals and institutions have historically played in shaping the political and legal culture of each space and time.