María Guadalupe Martínez Alles

María Guadalupe Martínez Alles is an associate professor with tenure at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law and a faculty affiliate at the Ved Nanda Center for International and Comparative Law and the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence for Law and Automation at IE University. 

Before joining the faculty at the Sturm College of Law in August 2025, she was an associate professor of law at IE University (Madrid). She has also served as an assistant professor of law at Universidad de San Andrés (Buenos Aires) and has held visiting research positions at Yale Law School, the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster and Oxford University. She is currently a visiting professor at Universidad Adolfo Ibañez (Chile) and has held visiting professorship positions at Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Universidad de Buenos Aires and The University of Hong Kong.

She works in the areas of tort theory, comparative private law, consumer law and punitive damages. Drawing on legal doctrine and insights from modern cognitive and social psychology, her scholarship explores questions relating to the place of punishment in tort law, the role of victims in the tort process, the relationship between product liability and risk regulation in the face of the challenges posed by new technologies and the notion of the vulnerable consumer in the digital economy. Her work has appeared in multiple peer-reviewed journals, as well as in edited collections of essays on private law theory. She teaches torts, advanced seminars on private law theory, and product liability and risk regulation.

Her monograph Torts and Retribution. The Case for Punitive Damages (Cambridge University Press 2025) is the first book that advances a novel retributive framework enabling the analysis of punitive damages across jurisdictions. 

Martínez Alles graduated, summa cum laude, from Universidad Nacional de Córdoba and holds LLM and JSD degrees from Yale Law School. Before becoming an academic, she worked as a law clerk for a district court judge in Córdoba, as a legal advisor at the Córdoba Agency for Investment and Development Projects and as a legal advisor at the Washington D.C. office of the Inter-American Development Bank.

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• LLM, JSD, Yale Law School

• LLB, LLM, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba