Maria José is an expert in Collective redress in Comparative law. Associate Professor at University of Paris-Saclay and lecturer at several national and international Universities, namely University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas, at Master's degree, her main areas of teaching and research are Consumer law, International Contracts and Comparative procedural law.
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 in France and Argentina, under a Comparative Law perspective (published by the French editor Dalloz, in 2013).
She is the author of more than 80 contributions in three languages, mainly related to class actions, collective, representative and group actions, in the fields of procedural law, torts and liability, consumer law, environmental law and discrimination. As a member of several scholarly institutions, Maria José has been heard in matters of group and collective actions in general in the Senate, the National Assembly and several agencies in France, as well as in the European Parliament, as one of the main authors of the Study on Collective redress in the EU Member States requested by the European Parliament.
Maria José co-chairs the Paris-Saclay Legal Clinics and founded the Observatory of Group Actions and other forms of Collective Redress in 2017, an international platform for researchers and practitioners aimed at collecting data related and analysing it from an interdisciplinary point of view.
She began her career as a lawyer at the Bar of Buenos Aires and has extensive experience in the practice of collective actions and the negotiation of amicable collective settlements on behalf of consumer associations in Argentina.
At present, aside from lecturing, Maria José is an international counsel and serves on the Executive Board of two European non-profit organisations acting as plaintiffs in mass tort cases and seeking to grant access to justice on a collective scale.