Lisa Hilbink

Lisa Hilbink (Ph.D., UC-San Diego) is Associate Professor of Political Science and a member of the Human Rights Faculty at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her research and teaching address a wide range of issues related to law, justice, and democracy in polities around the world, with a particular focus on Latin America and Iberia. She is a two-time Fulbright grantee to Chile and Spain, and before joining the faculty at Minnesota, was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows and lecturer in the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. 

Dr. Hilbink’s publications include peer-reviewed journal articles in fora such as Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, Law and Society Review, Political Research Quarterly, and World Politics, numerous chapters in edited volumes, and an award-winning book: Judges beyond Politics in Democracy and Dictatorship: Lessons from Chile (Cambridge University Press 2007). She published an expanded version of that book in Spanish with FLACSO-Mexico in 2014.  Dr. Hilbink is also co-editor (with Ofelia Ferrán) of Legacies of Violence in Contemporary Spain: Exhuming the Past, Understanding the Present (Routledge 2016). Her current work focuses on two themes: (1) the causes, nature, and consequences of judicial behavior for democracy and (2) the origins of public perceptions of justice institutions and their consequences for access to justice in the Americas.

Dr. Hilbink has been a visiting professor at the Universidad Austral de Chile (Valdivia) and has taught graduate courses at the National Judicial College in Reno, Nevada, at ICESI in Cali, Colombia, and at the Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicos de la Universidad Autónoma de México. In addition, she has consulted on judicial reform in Chile and Colombia, and has been involved in projects on judicial independence, human rights, and access to justice and legal empowerment in Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and the Middle East. She serves on the editorial board of Comparative Political Studies, as well as on the international board of the Centro de Investigaciones Derecho y Sociedad de la Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Santiago, Chile.