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Biography
Dr. Valeria Ruiz Perez is an Assistant Professor in Criminal Evidence and Criminal Justice at the School of Law. She joined the University of Nottingham in 2025 after completing her PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she taught Criminal Law, Introduction to the Legal System, Legal Research and Writing Skills, and Introduction to International Human Rights Law (LSE Summer School). She holds an LLM in Public Law from the same institution. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).
Her research sits at the intersection of criminal law, constitutional theory, and human rights. Her doctoral project explored the conceptual relationship between punishment and the state's claims of political authority, focusing on the 'unconstitutional state of affairs' in Colombian prisons as a stark illustration of the tensions and contradictions inherent to that relationship. Her research situates these local dynamics within broader global trends in penal policy and constitutionalism.
After her PhD, Valeria was a Research Associate at the Centre for Applied Human Rights at the University of York. There, she worked on the rights of older persons in contexts of armed conflict and served as Co-Investigator on the Rethinking Accountability from the Bottom project, alongside Principal Investigator Piergiuseppe Parisi and Co-Principal Investigator Mattia Pinto. This project, co-developed with a Nasa indigenous community and a local prosecutor's office in Cauca, Colombia, critically examines how traditional grassroots justice mechanisms address serious human rights violations. It challenges dominant paradigms of accountability by questioning the assumption that justice necessarily entails prosecution and imprisonment.
Valeria is also a qualified lawyer in Colombia, with professional experience in the international NGO sector and in public policy work.