Fernando Serrano Migallón

Fernando Alberto Lazaro Serrano Migallón was born in Mexico City on 26 June 1945 into a family of Spanish Republican exiles. He was the youngest of six children and the only one born in Mexico. His father, Francisco Serrano Pacheco, had been a lawyer and one of the last public prosecutors of the Second Spanish Republic; he arrived in Mexico in 1942 aboard the Nyassa, and the rest of the family joined him in 1944. The experience of exile shaped his life and much of his later research.

He studied law and economics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where his undergraduate thesis won the Punto de Partida prize. He obtained a certificate of higher studies at the International Institute of Public Administration in Paris and a diploma from The Hague Academy of International Law, and later earned a doctorate in history at UNAM's Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, receiving the Antonio Caso medal for his thesis.

Serrano Migallón taught political science, theory of the state, public international law and constitutional law at UNAM's Faculty of Law for more than four decades, and also taught public administration and international relations at El Colegio de Mexico. He was UNAM's general counsel from 1993 to 1995 and again in 2000, and director of the Faculty of Law for two terms from 2000 to 2008, when he renewed the curricula, introduced pre specialisations and brought art into the faculty's spaces.

In government he was director general of sectoral coordination at the Ministry of Human Settlements and Public Works, legal director at the Ministry of Commerce, legal coordinator of the Federal District Department and commercial manager of the national airports authority. As a specialist in intellectual property he took part in drafting the Federal Copyright Law and in the reorganisation that created the National Copyright Institute, which he later directed. He was secretary general of the Chamber of Deputies, cultural and artistic secretary of the National Council for Culture and the Arts from 2009 to 2011, under secretary for higher education at the Ministry of Public Education from 2012 to 2014, and director of the Instituto Alfonso Reyes.

He wrote more than 50 books and coordinated more than 20 others. His works include Isidro Fabela y la diplomacia mexicana (1981), El grito de independencia (1983), El asilo politico en Mexico (1998), Duras las tierras ajenas: un asilo, tres exilios (2002), Los barcos de la libertad (2006), Historia minima de las constituciones en Mexico (2013), Teoria de la Constitucion (2015), the ten volume La vida constitucional de Mexico and La inteligencia peregrina. He wrote columns for El Universal and Excelsior.

He was elected to the Mexican Academy of Language on 29 September 2006, presided over the Mexican Academy of Jurisprudence and Legislation, and was a corresponding member of the Mexican Academy of History and a member of the Seminario de Cultura Mexicana.

Serrano Migallón remained deeply attached to the memory of the Spanish Republic. El Pais reported that he refused to take up full Spanish citizenship because it would have meant swearing loyalty to the King. In Hurgar en el corazon he wrote about his parents and their arrival in Mexico. He was named bibliophile of the year at the Guadalajara International Book Fair in 2015. His family announced his death in the name of the Serrano Mendez family.

Fernando Serrano Migallón died on Tuesday 27 October 2026, aged 81. His death was announced by his family, by UNAM's Faculty of Law, which mourned its beloved professor emeritus, and by the Mexican Academy of Language. No cause of death was made public. A wake was held the same day from 4pm to 9pm at the Panteon Frances de San Joaquin in Mexico City, with a funeral Mass at noon on 28 October followed by cremation.

Serrano Migallón linked the history of the Spanish Republican exile with Mexican constitutional history and intellectual property law, and his multi volume history of Mexico's constitutions remains a standard reference. He shaped a generation of Mexican lawyers as a teacher and as director of UNAM's Faculty of Law. He received the National Prize for Arts and Literature in 2021 in history, social sciences and philosophy, the French National Order of Merit, the Spanish Order of Isabella the Catholic, a WIPO award for the promotion of copyright, and in February 2026 was named professor emeritus of UNAM by unanimous vote of the University Council.