Julieta Lemaitre Ripoll

Spring 2025 Short-Term International Visitor

Julieta Lemaitre Ripoll is investigative magistrate at the Justice Chambers of the Colombian Special Jurisdiction for Peace, created in 2018 to implement the transitional justice component of the peace agreements. Before her appointment, she taught at the Law School in Universidad de Los Andes as associate professor from 2007 to 2018. She has a law degree from Universidad de Los Andes (1995), a Masters in Gender and Religious Studies from New York University (1998) and a doctoral degree (SJD) in Law and Social Theory from Harvard Law School (2007). She has been Robina Human Rights visiting scholar at the Yale Law School (2014–2015) and a PRIO global fellow (2014–2017.) She has published in English in several peer reviewed journals as well as book chapters in edited volumes. Her books in Spanish include, El Derecho como Conjuro (2009) La Paz en Cuestión (2011) and El Estado siempre llega tarde (2019.)

As an investigative judge, her work in the transitional justice jurisdiction has focused on shaping Case 01, which indicted the leadership of the former guerrilla for war crimes and crimes against humanity of hostage taking and grave deprivations of liberty. She has led the use of a dialogic, rather than an adversarial, procedure as well as the use of restorative justice methods to rethink the transitional judge’s role as a mediator in the quest for both individual accountability and national reconciliation.

She still lectures occasionally at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá as well as in universities abroad (recently: Melbourne Law School and Sciences-Po Paris) and tries to write articles and not just decisions.