Maria José Azar-Baud

Maria José Azar-Baud is an Associate Professor at the University of Paris-Saclay and a lecturer at several international Universities teaching Class actions, Consumer law, Procedural law, and Comparative law. In 2017, she founded the Observatory of Group Actions and other forms of Collective Redress, an international platform sharing information about collective actions. 

She is also a qualified lawyer at the Bars of Paris and of Buenos Aires and, as an International Expert in Comparative Collective Redress, she advises major actors in the field (i.e., European institutions, NGOs, an international claim administrator, third-party funders, law-firms in Europe, North and South America, and Australia). 

She sits on the Board of European non-for-profit organisations and seeks to grant access to justice on a collective scale, in her role as the former President of Ius Omnibus, a consumer association designated as a Qualified Entity within the European Union and the Diesel Emissions Justice Foundation).  

Maria José holds a double PhD from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University and the University of Buenos Aires focusing on Collective actions in Consumer law under a Comparative Law perspective (published by Dalloz in 2013). She is the author of more than 150 contributions in French, English and Spanish related to class actions, representative and group actions in the fields of procedural law, torts and liability, consumer, environmental and discrimination law. 

She has consulted with the French Senate, French Parliament, international agencies and various ministries including Japan, the Commission and the European Parliament, and is one of the main authors of the Study on Collective redress in the EU Member States.