Dr Francisco Quintana

Lecturer in Global Law

PhD in Law (University of Cambridge); LLM (Harvard Law School); LLM Public International Law (London School of Economics and Political Science, with Distinction); Abogado (Universidad Torcuato Di Tella)

Email: Francisco.Quintana@ed.ac.uk

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Dr Francisco J. Quintana is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Global Law at Edinburgh Law School, where he is Co-Director of the Global Law LLB. He is Managing Editor of AJIL Unbound and was previously Associate Editor of the European Journal of International Law (2023-2026).

Francisco works on the legal foundations of international ordering. Drawing on history, geopolitics, and political economy, he asks how international and transnational law shape the distribution of power and resources across borders, and how they enable or constrain attempts by rising and smaller powers to alter those distributions. His current research examines monetary governance as a site of geoeconomic contest: dollar dominance and de-dollarisation, emergency liquidity, and financial infrastructure.

His article ‘Dollar Dominance, De-Dollarization, and International Law’ (Journal of International Economic Law, 2025) received the John H. Jackson Prize, awarded annually to the article that ‘most significantly breaks new ground and adds new insights to the study and understanding of international economic law’. He is developing this work into a broader research agenda, ‘Global Liquidity Law’, centred on central bank swap lines and related liquidity facilities. It asks how legal design shapes which states obtain emergency money and on what terms, and how these arrangements in turn affect the international economic order. He has also taken this work to policy audiences. In 2026, he co-authored a Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy briefing paper on dollar decentring and the United Kingdom’s trade and investment policy, and spoke at an expert session on de-dollarisation at the UK Trade Policy Forum.

His book project, based on his doctoral research at the University of Cambridge, examines an earlier contest over international order. ‘From Worldmaking to Rights-Making: Economic Order, Human Rights, and the Narrowing of International Law in the Americas’ draws on archival research to show how changes in international law narrowed the post-war economic ambitions of Latin American diplomats and jurists into a human rights agenda. Parts of this research have appeared or are forthcoming in the Journal of the History of International Law, the International Journal of Constitutional Law, and AJIL Unbound. 

Francisco’s work has appeared in the European Journal of International Law, the American Journal of International Law, the Journal of International Economic Law, the International Journal of Constitutional Law, and the Journal of the History of International Law, as well as in the Cambridge History of International Law and the Oxford Handbook on International Law and the Americas. He co-edited the special issue ‘Bogotá at 75’ (Journal of the History of International Law, 2024, with Justina Uriburu) and has edited the inaugural special issue of the Latin American and Caribbean Journal of International Law (forthcoming 2026), on the law and practice of international organisations in the Americas, which features an epilogue by Judge Juan Manuel Gómez Robledo of the International Court of Justice.

For wider audiences, he has written for newspapers including The New York Times and for blogs such as EJIL: Talk! He is often interviewed on international law and global politics by outlets including the BBC, The Guardian, and AFP, as well as Perfil and Radio Nacional in Argentina.

Francisco has contributed to legal teams handling proceedings before the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, including on climate change and crimes against humanity. Early in his career, he worked across the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government in Argentina.

At Edinburgh, Francisco shapes and delivers the new Global Law LLB, which he co-directs. He convenes or has convened the courses ‘Global Law’, ‘Global Legal Systems’, and ‘International Private Law’, and lectures on ‘Global Public and Private Law’. He came to Edinburgh with over a decade of teaching in common law and civil law systems. At the Geneva Graduate Institute he designed and convened the course ‘International Law and Geopolitics’. In 2026, he was Faculty Lead at the Intensive Doctoral Week at Sciences Po.

He holds a PhD in Law from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Gates Cambridge Scholar and where his thesis was approved without corrections and nominated for the Yorke Prize; an LLM from Harvard Law School, where he received two Dean’s Scholar Prizes; an LLM in Public International Law, with Distinction, from the London School of Economics and Political Science; and a law degree (Abogado) from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. He has also held Chevening, Fulbright, and Lacroze de Fortabat fellowships, and received the Award for Academic Excellence of the Buenos Aires Bar Association. Before joining Edinburgh, he was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute and a Florence-Geneva Postdoctoral Fellow at the Geneva Graduate Institute.

Francisco regularly organises interdisciplinary events that connect scholars across geographical, epistemic, and disciplinary communities. He is an active member of the Latin American Society of International Law (LASIL-SLADI), where he has served on the Executive Committee and twice on the Organising Committee for its Biennial Conferences. He has also sat on the programme committee of the American Society of International Law (ASIL) Abroad meeting in Buenos Aires, where he led a roundtable on sovereign debt, sovereign assets, and the law of financial statecraft.

In addition to his editorial work at AJIL Unbound and EJIL, Francisco is International Organizations Law Editor at the Latin American and Caribbean Journal of International Law, and has held editorial roles at EJIL: Talk! and the Cambridge International Law Journal. He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Revista Latinoamericana de Derecho Internacional.

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