Introduction
Jorge Barrera-Rojas is an Assistant Professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law. He teaches torts, comparative constitutional law, and education law. His scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the Georgetown Law Journal, the Cardozo Law Review, the University of Illinois Law Review, the Notre Dame Law Review, the George Washington International Law Review, and the Washington and Lee Law Review Online, among others.
Barrera-Rojas focuses his scholarship on comparative constitutional law, education law and federalism, free exercise and parental rights, and international human rights law. He combines doctrinal analysis of U.S. constitutional law with a comparative method drawn from European, and Inter-American constitutional traditions.
Before joining St. Thomas, Barrera-Rojas was an Olin-Searle Fellow and Associate Research Scholar in Law at Yale Law School, where he co-taught Comparative Constitutional Law with Professor Steven G. Calabresi. He was previously a Visiting Assistant Professor of Law and the Robert E. Rodes Jr. Fellow in Law and Religion at the Program on Church, State & Society at Notre Dame Law School, where he taught Torts, Law of Education, and International Religious Liberty. He has also served as a Visiting Scholar at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Stanford Constitutional Law Center. He also served as a law clerk to Judge Alberto Borea of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and as a judicial extern to the Hon. Thomas L. Kirsch II of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
Barrera-Rojas attended law school at Universidad de Chile, where he graduated with distinction. He then earned an LL.M. from UCLA School of Law in the David J. Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy, a J.S.D. from Notre Dame Law School, and a Ph.D. in International and European Law from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, awarded jointly through a cotutelle program. After his Chilean legal training, he served as legal counsel at the Jaime Guzmán Foundation and then as senior legislative staff in the Chilean Senate. He later joined Bofill Mir Abogados in Santiago, where he became a Partner and Head of Public Law and Regulated Markets and was recognized by The Legal 500 Latin America as a Next-Generation Partner. He served as Chief Counsel and Constitutional Coordinator for the majority of the Chilean Constitutional Council, the body convened in 2023 to draft a proposed new Chilean constitution, and as a Comparative and Foreign Law Specialist at the U.S. Law Library of Congress. He has also held tenure-track appointments at Universidad de Chile and Universidad San Sebastián, where he taught Constitutional Law and Administrative Law and served as Faculty Director of the LL.M. in Constitutional Law program at Universidad San Sebastián.