Draft:Bruno Aguilera-Barchet

Teaching Career

After graduating in Law with Honors and completing his doctorate at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, he began his teaching career at that institution as Associate Professor of Legal History (Profesor Titular de Historia del Derecho) from 1982 to 1991. During this period he also served as Vice-Dean for International Relations at the School of Law (1987–1991)^[7].

In 1991 he obtained the Full Professorship (Cátedra) of Legal History at the Universidad de Extremadura, where he served as Director of the Department of Legal History until 1996^[8].

Since 1996 he has been a Full Professor at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, where he conducts his teaching and research. At this institution he has held various academic and administrative posts, including Secretary General and member of the Governing Commission (Comisión Gestora) (1997–2000), Dean of the School of Legal and Social Sciences, (2000–2003), Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities, (2022), and Director of the University Institute of International Legal Studies (2003–present)^[1].

His teaching has focused on Legal History, particularly on Comparative Legal History.

Dean of the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences from 2001 to 2003.

Secretary-General of Rey Juan Carlos University. Start of the academic year with the President of the Community of Madrid, Alberto Ruiz Gallardón.

International Profile and Visiting Professorships

He has had an extensive international academic career.

He has been a Visiting Researcher at Harvard Law School (1995–1996) and at the Faculty of Law of McGill University in Montreal, Canada (Spring semester 2019).

He has taught as a Visiting Professor at various universities, including the University of New Mexico School of Law (2018), where he imparted the course Comparative and Historical Legal Perspectives; at the Facoltà di Giurisprudenza, Università degli Studi di Milano, where he worked closely with its Dean, Professor Antonio Padoa-Schioppa, on the comparative history of European law; and at the Faculté de Droit de l'Université de Paris XII (UPEC: Paris Est Créteil), in collaboration with its Dean, Professor Alain Desrayaud.

He has also taught orientation classes for first-year students at Shanghai University (2019): From Frankenstein to Androids: How to Get a Job Despite Algorithms. And in 2020: Technology and Books: Recipes for Surviving in a Pandemic Era?^[3]

Visiting Professor at Shanghai University

At the National Institute of Public Administration of Mexico (2025), he taught a Curso de Postdoctorado en Inteligencia Artificial para la Administración pública" (Postdoctoral Course in Artificial Intelligence for Public Administration).

At the Universidad Panamericana (México), in January of 2026, he taught a Curso de capacitación metodológica de profesores" (Methodological Training Course for Professors) on the “Pop Law” method — which aims to enable students to better understand and appreciate Law not only through legal texts, but also through pertinent novels, films and series — at the Mexico City (Mixcoac), Aguascalientes, and Guadalajara campuses. The course was aimed at professors who will teach the three subjects forming part of the Core Iuris, as part of the new curriculum for the new Global Law degree (titulación en Derecho global) there^[9][3].

He has also participated as a guest professor in academic and postgraduate programs, and has been a faculty member of the Doctoral Program in Legal Sciences at the School of Law of the Universidad de Oriente in Santiago de Cuba since January 29, 2024. He has been member of the Advisory Council of the School of Law of the Universidad Panamericana (Mexico) since October 2025.

Conferences and International Academic Activity

Dr. Aguilera-Barchet has participated as a speaker at universities and specialized legal centers in Mexico and elsewhere. Notable among these was his appearance at the UNM School of Law on September 7, 2016, where he delivered the John Field Simms Sr. Memorial Lecture on Law, with a talk entitled The Legal Labyrinth of Brexit^[10].

He participated in the conference "Derecho e Inteligencia Artificial en la Unión Europea" ("Law and Artificial Intelligence in the European Union") at the National Institute of Public Administration of Mexico, and at the Auditoría Superior de la Federación (Supreme Audit Institution of the Federation) venue in Mexico City, on October 22, 2024^[7].

He delivered a lectured entitled "La noción del Estado de derecho" ("The Notion of the Rule of Law") at the Escuela Libre de Derecho (Free School of Law) on October 23, 2024.

On October 25, 2024, in Mexico City, he participated in the conference "Geopolítica de la Unión Europea" ("Geopolitics of the European Union") at the Mexican Institute of Strategic National Security and Defense Studies.

He was the first Spanish member of the Academic Council of the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies, the think tank of the European People's Party in Brussels. In this role, he worked to preserve and strengthen the rule of law through educational policy enabling young Europeans to understand the concept of legal federalism underpinning the European Union. He held that position for 16 years, from 2007 to 2023^[11].

International Cooperation and Institutional Projects

In his capacity as the Director of the University Institute of International Legal Studies (Instituto Universitario de Estudios Jurídicos Internacionales) at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, he has been involved in a broad range of activities.

In Latin America, he promoted the Master en Cooperación y Relaciones Internacionales con América Latina (Master's in Cooperation and International Relations with Latin America) together with the Ibero-American Studies Center at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos^[12].

In Mauritania, he directed the project "Estado de Derecho y Mujer en Mauritania" ("Rule of Law and Women in Mauritania") from 2005 to 2008, funded by the Comunidad de Madrid (Community of Madrid), as well as the "El Libro blanco de la descentralización en Mauritania" ("The White Paper on Decentralization in Mauritania") 2008–2009 project, funded by AECID (Spain's Agency for International Development Cooperation). In addition, he promoted an agreement with the University of Nouakchott Al Aasriya for the implementation of legal cooperation projects^[7].

In Vietnam, he promoted agreements with the Ministry of Justice of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam for the development of cooperation in the field of justice; with Vietnam National University, Hanoi, for the implementation of legal cooperation projects, including, the creation of an Institute for the Defense of Women's and Children's Rights; and with the Ho Chi Minh City University School of Law (Saigon) for the implementation of legal cooperation projects, specifically in the development of tourism law in Vietnam.

Exchange programme with the Faculty of Law at Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City.

Research Activity

His research focuses on Comparative Legal History and the evolution of Western public law. He has directed and participated in historical-legal research projects and cultural outreach initiatives.

He has served on the editorial boards of academic journals, including as Secretary of the Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español (Yearbook of Spanish Legal History), one of Spain's most historic legal journals and the leading periodical of reference for legal historians writing in Spanish^[5].

He has also co-directed, together with Agnès García Saillard, the Aproximación Literaria a la Guerra Civil, 89 años después. Una guía para jóvenes (A Literary Approach to the Civil War, 89 Years On: A Guide for Young People) project, which gave rise to a series of Symposium Days held on October 7, 15, 22, and 28, 2025, at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid (Vicálvaro Campus), with participation by some of Spain's finest contemporary writers who have addressed the Civil War in their work. Among them were Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, Juan Manuel de Prada, David Uclés, Jesús Ruiz Mantilla, Paco Cerdà, Inmaculada de la Fuente, and Pilar Eyre. They were joined by other cultural figures such as José Luis García-Berlanga Manrique, son of Luis García Berlanga; Professor Sandra Anchondo Pavón of the Universidad Panamericana (Mexico), who spoke about Republican exiles; and Belén González Dorao, daughter of literary scholar Marisol Dorao, an expert on Elena Fortún and the key figure in the remarkable story of the belated recovery of the manuscript of Celia en la Revolución^[4].

Tratado de Derecho Pop (A Pop Law Treatise) (2021)

This book introduces readers, in an accessible and compelling way, to the past, present, and future of Law, drawing on major literary, artistic, and audiovisual works that, by demystifying this discipline, allow readers to better appreciate it — because we can only come to know what we love. The book stems from the realization that the Law has a reputation — often deserved — of being an esoteric and incomprehensible art reserved for experts, giving rise to feelings of helplessness, frustration, and even anguish among ordinary citizens.

And yet, the Law is something intrinsic to human beings, who through it have managed to dominate the Earth — for without it, we would have killed each other at the first opportunity. Thanks to the Law, we have managed to coexist in increasingly large, better organized, and more powerful groups, without abandoning the rigor and order that are the essence of the legal realm^[13].

A further step in his endeavor to produce academic works that demystify and “popularize” the Law is his Demystifying the Legal Art of Order, Power and Fun: An Introduction to Pop Law, published in 2025 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book is based on the same philosophy of delivering a high-quality text that allows readers to better understand the Law by means of a “pop” approach, this time aimed at an English-speaking audience from the perspective of the Common Law^[14].

Entre Estado y nación: sociedad, poder y derecho, de la prehistoria a la integración europea (Between State and Nation: Society, Power and Law, from Prehistory to European Integration) (2011)

In this book, Aguilera-Barchet traces an uninterrupted journey from the earliest Western societies to the present day. Beyond addressing the essential milestones of our common culture, the work compels the reader to reconsider such fundamental concepts as the State and the nation, around which European civilization has revolved ever since its origins. As he rightly argues, European integration demands that we view the political and legal history of the member states from a comparative perspective, for it is impossible to understand where we stand in the complex process of building a united Europe without tracing the history of the Western constitutional and legal tradition step by step^[15].

In 2014 he wrote a longer, revised version of this work in English, published by Springer under the title A History of Western Public Law (2014). The book describes the historical evolution of public law and the state from Antiquity to the present, offering accounts of significant events alongside a rendering of the general historical context, explaining the relationships between political, religious, and economic developments. The book has been very well received and constitutes a worldwide point of reference in the field^[16] .

El derecho en la época del Quijote (Law in the Age of Don Quijote) (2007)

To mark the four-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Don Quijote, the Institute of International Legal Studies organized an international seminar from March 15 to 17, 2005, at which Spanish and foreign legal historians sought to revive and uphold an understanding of the historical and legal memory of the era in which Cervantes's masterwork first appeared. Don Quijote is a primary legal source of the first order for understanding the law as it was actually experienced in this era past, as opposed to the recondite academic law studied in the lecture halls of Salamanca, Valladolid, and Alcalá de Henares. It is relevant to note that Miguel de Cervantes’ grandfather, Juan de Cervantes, had received his legal education at the latter town’s renowned university, undoubtedly passing his knowledge on to his grandson, as legal content recurs throughout the masterpiece of Spanish literature^[17].

Iniciación histórica al Derecho Musulmán (Historical Introduction to Islamic Law) (2007)

The book is introduced with the following summary: "A European judge denies divorce to a Muslim woman who wishes to separate from an abusive husband, citing the fact that corporal punishment of women is an accepted practice under the Quran. This is not fiction; it is something that actually happened in the Federal Republic of Germany in 2007. This constitutes yet another example of the extent to which Islam has become part of the daily reality of Westerners, who had hitherto assumed that the world revolved around our way of life. Many began to intuit this was not so on September 11, 2001, but with distrust and unease, as for those who knew nothing about Islam, it was difficult to distinguish between a handful of deranged extremists and a vast majority of well-meaning Muslim citizens. This book, therefore, aims to introduce the lay reader to the reality of Islam in a straightforward way. Why from a legal perspective? Simply because for Muslims, law and religion are one and the same thing, a perspective standing in stark contrast to the worldview of Western culture — since the French Revolution, at least. That said, the author also seeks to prompt reflection on the current meaning of our own civilization, with its enslaving extreme materialism and clichéd yet very real loss of values, which has certainly left its mark on the legal sphere^[18].

Estado y Derecho en España: un ensayo de historia comparada (State and Law in Spain: An Essay in Comparative History) (2010)

The aim of this comparative history essay is to highlight the distinctive features of the State and the Law in Spain within the broader European tradition so that both students of Law and practicing lawyers who wish to better understand the meaning of their profession realize that Law did not arise from nothing, and it is not an invention of politicians or university professors. Rather, its roots can be traced to a long tradition in which the legal sphere has continually adapted to the historical circumstances of each era. This volume, subtitled Las bases: de los orígenes al año 711 (Foundations: From the Origins to 711 AD), is the first of a planned series of three. The second will address the Ancien Régime and cover the period from the fall of the Visigoth Kingdom of Toledo to the rise of the Bourbons in Spain. The third will examine the contemporary period from the Decretos de Nueva Planta to the Transition, which would give rise to the 1978 Constitution, all duly framed within the broader processes of state formation and transformation in the Western tradition^[19].

"The Law of the Welfare State," in the Oxford Handbook of European Legal History (2018)

One of the essential features of contemporary legal systems is the emergence of a body of law designed to guarantee the protection of the most vulnerable within the framework of what came to be called the “welfare state.” Chapter 43 of the Oxford Handbook of European Legal History (2018) traces the legal framework of social protection from the Poor Law system under the Ancien Régime, through to the Social Question (what the state should do to address and ameliorate the plight of the poor in the wake of the Industrial Revolution), which would spawn socialism. In turn, the work analyzes the democratic response initiated by Bismarck's social legislation, before the baton was taken up by successive British governments under Lloyd George, implementing the Beveridge system, the model that would inspire the social security systems spreading across Europe in the twentieth century, premised on the idea that inequality must be corrected by states using taxpayer funds to lay the foundations of a more just society^[20].

Droit et Religion (Law and Religion)

This volume contains the papers from the seminar held November 12–15, 2008, at the Faculté de Droit de l'Université de Paris XII, jointly organized by the Centre d'Histoire du droit européen of Paris XII and the Institute of International Legal Studies at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid. The seminar examined how the secularization of state and law imposed by the French Revolution was countered during the twentieth century by a resurgence of religious principles in Law, especially following the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which brought a return to theocracy in numerous Islamic states. The volume also analyzes how religious values have taken on a new dimension in contemporary Western democracies, with clear reflections in Law^[21].

Sistema europeo de justicia administrativa (European System of Administrative Justice) (2012)

The author begins by discussing the remarkable evolution that the Spanish system of administrative justice has undergone from the pre-constitutional era of General Franco to the present, to the entry into force of the 1978 Constitution. The work focuses on two specific aspects: citizens' access to justice, and the acts of public authorities subject to constitutional review, proceeding to analyze the framework of European Community law and to identify the shortcomings of Europe’s jurisdictional system as regards its oversight of public authorities^[22].

La Burbuja Universitaria (The University Bubble), written by Libero Zuppiroli (2012).

Bruno Aguilera Barchet undertook the translation of the book and included a foreword in which he explains that Zuppiroli conducts an analysis aimed at understanding the current state of the university.

In this book, Libero Zuppiroli poses the following questions: How can university lecturers at the world’s ‘best’ scientific and technological universities still take pleasure in teaching or maintain the serenity essential for thinking, when they have to devote most of their time to fundraising, administrative tasks or marketing? What would a university be like without bureaucratic ‘controlling’? Has the current university system not brought about the death of the imagination and freedom required for intellectual creation? Libero Zuppiroli addresses these crucial questions in this reflection—not without humour—on the university and education. It is a scathing satire based on the example of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, which has become the paradigm of today’s university. His pen mercilessly attacks shoddy science turned into a media spectacle and inapplicable applied research, before immersing us in the imaginary world of a university called Utopia where people think more. The university bubble ends up in the wake of Thomas More.

a) ACADEMIC WORKS

He is the author of 11 books and dozens of academic articles in Spanish, English, and French, his research spanning various fields of comparative legal history.

b) JOURNALISTIC WORKS

The author of numerous opinion pieces in Spanish national newspapers: El Mundo, El País, La Razón, ABC.