Maria José Azar-Baud

Associate Professor at Paris-Saclay University & International Collective Redress Expert

Speaker

Professor Maria José AZAR-BAUD is an international expert in collective redress and mass litigation, with over twenty-five years of experience at the intersection of comparative procedural law, consumer protection and access to justice. She serves as Associate Professor of Law at Paris-Saclay University and holds a double PhD from Panthéon-Sorbonne University and the University of Buenos Aires about Collective Actions in Consumer Law under a Comparative Perspective. Admitted to the Bars of Buenos Aires and Paris, she combines academic scholarship with claimant-side practice, advising on the structuring and governance of domestic and cross-border collective actions. She serves as a professional board member of European non-profit organisations bringing collective actions at the EU level and, in various capacities, has been involved in more than one hundred collective proceedings across Europe and Latin America in recent years. She is the founder and director of the Observatory of Class Actions & Collective Redress, an international and interdisciplinary platform dedicated to the comparative and empirical study of group litigation worldwide and has authored more than one hundred publications in French, Spanish and English.