Fitxa persona

Lucía Martínez Garay holds degrees in Law (1997) and in Criminology (2006) from the University of Valencia, and a PhD in Law from the same University (2004) with Extraordinary Award. She worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Universitat Jaume I in Castellón and as an assistant lecturer at the University of Alicante, and is since 2008 Senior Lecturer in the Department of Criminal Law at the University of Valencia.

She has been awarded 4 five-year teaching periods (quinquenios) and 3 six-year research periods (sexenios).

She teaches or has taught in several degrees (Degree in Law, Degree in Criminology, Double Degrees in ADE-Law and Law-Criminology), as well as in several Masters of the Universitat de València (Master in Business Law: Commercial, Labour and Tax Consultancy; Master in Criminology and Security; Master in Criminal Guarantees and Socioeconomic Crimes). She has also taught in several of the University of Valencia's own degrees and in the Master's Degree in Criminal Law at the Autonomous University of Madrid.

She has done several pre- and post-doctoral research stays at the Universities of Freiburg (Germany, 1998-99), Columbia (New York, 2002), at the Max-Planck Institut für ausländisches und internationales Strafrecht in Freiburg (Germany, 2001, 2013, 2015), and at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (2024).

Since 2018 she is the Director of the research group ‘Current Trends in Criminal Law and Criminology: Prevention and Criminal Guarantees’. She has been PI for two years of a national R&D project and is co-directing another one, and has been a member of numerous projects funded in both national and regional competitive tenders

She wrote her doctoral thesis on criminal imputability and culpability, a subject on which she has continued to work since then, publishing two books (Consumo de drogas y responsabilidad penal: el consumo de drogas como causa de exención o de atenuación de la responsabilidad penal en derecho comparado, Editorial Jurídica Continental, 2005, and La imputabilidad penal: concepto, fundamento, naturaleza jurídica y elementos, Tirant lo Blanch, 2005), various articles and book chapters (such as the Memento Experto Penal in its successive editions), and with participations and conferences in seminars and congresses. She has formed part of the commission of the Criminal Policy Study Group which has drawn up an alternative proposal for the regulation of the legal consequences applicable to persons who commit crimes while suffering from a mental disorder or intellectual disability (2023).

She has also studied the crimes of belonging to criminal and terrorist organisations and their compatibility with fundamental rights, co-authoring with Javier Mira Benavent a monograph on the limitations that the proceedings in Spain for offences related to ETA terrorism have had on the fundamental right to assembly and demonstration (Audiencia Nacional y prohibición penal de reuniones y manifestaciones, Tirant lo Blanch, 2011), as well as several articles related to the subject.

More recently, her research has focused on violence risk assessments, both purely algorithmical / actuarial and also structured clinical judgement, as well as the progressive introduction of artificial intelligence in this field and in criminal justice, analysing both their advantages and the risks they entail for various criminal guarantees. The results of this line of research have been, in addition to the publication of several articles and book chapters, the collaboration with international organisations such as GREVIO (Council of Europe Group to combat violence against women and domestic violence, 2019) or Amnesty International (2021, 2022), as well as the coordination of the report Three predictive policing approaches in Spain: Viogén, RisCanvi and VeriPol: Assessment from a human rights perspective (2024).

She is also currently working on the positive obligations of the States to use the criminal law to protect human rights, and the transformations they entail for penal guarantees and for the traditional role of the principle of proportionality.

A list of her publications can be found in her Dialnet, ORCID, Google Scholar or Academia profiles.