Joxerramon Bengoetxea Caballero
Curriculum Vitae
Professor of the Philosophy of Law, with five 6-year research periods, six 5-year teaching periods and a 100-point recognition score in the Euskotramos supplements (2008). He has been a lecturer in legal theory at the UPV-EHU since 1990. He was director of the International Master’s in the Sociology of Law from 2007 to 2024. This Master's degree is taught in English and enjoys great prestige worldwide. He was also scientific director of the International Institute for the Sociology of Law (2005-07). As a researcher, he was awarded his PhD in Edinburgh (1990), where he had a research grant from the Basque Government (1986-89), under the supervision of the prestigious Neil MacCormick, and the book drawn from his thesis, The Legal Reasoning of the European Court of Justice, was published in 1993 by Oxford University Press. He developed his research into judicial decision-making, judicial dialogues, the sociology of judges, argumentation used when applying the law, legal language and analysis, and legal logic. The analysis of the European integration process has led him to European federalism and the participation of stateless nations and regions in Europe. He has also focused on the human rights system in Europe and the ups and downs of political integration at the European level. Another subject to which he has devoted study and research is legal culture and its comparison; he has also analysed transitional justice as it relates to the criminal justice system. In all these subjects he has supervised eleven PhD theses and published over two hundred scientific papers in different languages: English, French, Basque and Spanish. He is the author of five books or monographs and has coordinated several books.
As a researcher and lecturer he has participated in dozens of research projects, travelling around Europe and going on stays around the world: Berlin in 1988, Florence and Saarbrücken in 1989, Oxford in 2001, Helsinki in 2006, Bordeaux every year since 2012, Stanford one term in 2012, Helsinki another term in 2013, Kansai (Osaka) five weeks in 2014, and Florence again in 2016 and 2017. His academic career was recognised with the conferring of an honorary doctorate by the University of Helsinki in 2023; he was the first and only person in Spain to receive this recognition in the legal and human (arts) sciences. His work has also been highlighted in the Basque Country, where he has received several awards: the Eusko Ikaskuntza Prize (2010) and the Jesús María Leizaola Prize (2021).
He also has experience outside the university in transfer work: he was a lawyer at the Court of Justice of the European Union with the British judge (1993-98 and 2001-2004). He has also been General Secretary of the Basque Council of the European Movement (2015-2020) and was Deputy Minister for Labour and Social Security in the Basque Government between 1998 and 2001. He was also a member of the Basque Electoral Board for one legislature and has been a member of the Arbitration Commission for Araba since 2015. In terms of university management, he was secretary of the Faculty of Law between 1991 and 1993 and director and coordinator of the ehuGune programme between 2012 and 2020.