Prof. Andrés Gascón Cuenca, Ph.D., (extraordinary Ph.D. award from the University of Valencia in 2018), is the vice-dean of Research and Quality Assurance of the Faculty of Law, a researcher at the Institute of Human Rights, the co-director of the Legal Clinic for Social Justice of the Faculty of Law, and a professor at the Department of Philosophy of Law and Politics, all of them structures of the University of Valencia.

His main research areas are the philosophy of law that looks into the theory of recognition, the protection of human rights in the context of social minorities (especially with regard to hate speech, racism, xenophobia, and racial profiling), access to justice and legal clinical education.

He has publications in which he has analyzed the reception of international standards against hate speech in the Spanish legal system, negationism, theories of justice and its development in legal clinical, among others.

He is an elected member of the board of directors of the Global Alliance for Justice in Education (GAJE), secretary of the. review Cuadernos Electrónicos de Filosofía del Derecho and member of the editorial board of Anuario de Filosofía del Derecho.

He has a positive evaluación of: 2 six-year research periods (sexennium); 2 five-year teaching performance evaluation periods (quinquennium).

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Predoctoral researcher in the Department of International Law "Adolfo Miaja de la Muela" Area of Public International Law, Member of the Institut de Drets Humans, Universitat de València (IDHUV)

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Clara Viana Ballester, Doctor of Law and Graduate in Criminology from the University of Valencia (awarded special honors in both Law and Criminology), is a Professor of Criminal Law at this University. She has been recognized with four five-year periods for teaching merits, two excellent advanced Docentia levels, and a six-year period for research. Her doctoral thesis is published in the Monograph Collection of the Congress of Deputies, under the title “Immunities and Inviolabilities: legal nature and dogmatic conception. Special reference to parliamentary inviolability” (2011).

He belongs to Research Group GIUV2017-382 on “Current trends in criminal law and criminology: Prevention and criminal guarantees.” He has conducted research stays at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law (Freiburg) and Paris II-Panthéon-Assas. Her lines of research include the personal causes of exemption from criminal responsibility (personal-functional guarantees), authorship and content on the Internet, the legal consequences of crime, and criminal enforcement, specifically the measure of probation. She has been a member of various research projects funded by national, regional, and university public institutions. During 2018-2019, she was the principal investigator of an R&D&I project awarded by the Valencian Regional Government for emerging groups entitled “Probation: political-criminal foundations and practical application.” Currently, since 2021, she is co-PI of a State Research Plan project entitled “The erosion of the principle of legality in the contemporary criminal justice system: diagnosis and proposed solutions” (R&D&I PID2021-123441NB-I00, funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/ and “ERDF A way to build Europe”).

Since her beginnings as a lecturer at the University of Alicante, where she was an Assistant Professor (LOU) for five years, she has been deeply committed to teaching and educational innovation, participating as a member and in the management and coordination of various innovation projects and networks, both at the University of Alicante and the University of Valencia (she has been the coordinator of seven projects and a member of eight others). She is currently the coordinator of the Educational Innovation Group, registered in the Register of Teaching Innovation Groups at the University of Valencia, called “Penal en Vena” (ref. GCID23_2589092, PevUV) and co-coordinator of the consolidated innovation project “Multimedia materials for teaching and learning criminal law.”

She has taught in the Bachelor's Degree programs in Law and Criminology, as well as in the double Bachelor's Degree programs in Law-Business Administration and Law-Criminology. She has also taught in the Master's Degree program in Business Law (Commercial, Labor, and Tax Consulting) and in the Master's Degree program in Criminal Guarantees and Socioeconomic Crimes. She has also supervised numerous Master's Theses (TFM) in the Master's Degree in Criminology and Security and in the Master's Degree in Criminal Guarantees and Socioeconomic Crimes.

Her experience in university management in a statutory position dates back to 2012, when she was appointed Deputy Secretary of the Faculty of Law and, since 2016, Secretary of the Center. She is secretary of the Academic Degree Committees (CAT) for Law, Criminology, and Political Science and Public Administration, secretary of the Faculty of Law Board, and a member of the Quality Committee, the Internship Committee, and the Faculty of Law's Temporary Teaching Staff Selection Committee 2, among other collegiate bodies. In recent years, she has participated as a member in multiple Selection Committees for contracted doctoral faculty (CDr.) and permanent faculty (PPL). She is also an elected member of the Center Board and the Faculty Senate of the University of Valencia.

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[Biography, english version]

Maria Amparo Ballester Pastor has been a Senior Professor of Labor and Social Security Law at the University of Valencia since 2008 and advisor to the Economic and Social Council of Spain (expert by Government appointment) since 2024. She has been educated at the University of Valencia and Cornell University (United States). She directed the University Institute of Women's Studies (2016-2020) and the Chair of Feminist Economics (2018-2019), at the University of Valencia. She was vice president of EUFEM (University Platform for Feminist and Gender Studies) and co-president of the Equality Commission of the Spanish Association of Labor Law and Social Security (2018 and 2019).

Professor Ballester Pastor has dedicated a good part of her professional career to research on gender discrimination in the workplace and social security, which has been reflected in numerous publications. She has also researched employment discrimination for other reasons (particularly age), conciliation/co-responsibility/working time, rights of migrant workers, fundamental rights in the labor dimension, temporary hiring, social law of the European Union, prevention regulations of occupational risks, and Social Security.

She has carried out several comparative law investigations based on funded stays at foreign universities where she has been a visiting professor, among which Stockholm University can be highlighted (carrying out research funded in 1996 on the reform of the pension system that was later the subject of publication) or Mac Gill University in Montreal (conducting funded research in 2010 on Age and Gender Discrimination that resulted in several publications). She has been the Main Investigator in several competitive research projects, one financed with funds from the European Union (international project 'Culture, custom and gender' 2002-2004). She has been an evaluator of undergraduate and postgraduate university and teaching degrees for the Andalusian Knowledge Agency. She has been an expert in evaluating Legal Sciences teachers for the Spanish Agency of Evaluation -ANECA- (2010-2018) and has been part of various evaluation commissions for research projects in Spain and Chile. She has been an external evaluator for various legal journals and has been part of the scientific committees of many projects, conferences, and seminars.

In the field of knowledge transfer, she has collaborated with different union entities, business organizations, professional associations, local entities, regional administrations, and other types of entities in the transference of research results. She has been part of the teams that have prepared three bills registered in the Congress of Deputies: a bill for equal pay between women and men (registered in October 2017), a bill against precariousness and for employment stability (registered in June 2018) and a bill on co-responsible working time (registered in November 2018).

Outside the strict university environment, her professional activity has had various aspects: She was a substitute Judge of the Superior Court of Justice of the Valencian Community from 1996 to 2015. From 2015 to 2019 she was part of the European Network of Legal Experts in Gender Equality and non-discrimination, an advisory body to the European Commission on gender matters. Between 2020 and 2023 she carried out senior positions in the Ministry of Labor and Social Economy of Spain: From 2020 to 2021 she was the Chief of the Cabinet of the Minister of Labor and Social Economy of Spain. And, from April 2021 to November 2023, she was the Chief of Legal Coordination of the Second Vice President of the Government. During her years of activity in the Ministry of Labor and Social Economy, she participated in the negotiation and preparation of legal regulations, including, among others, RD 901/2020 on equality plans; RD 902/2020 on equal pay; RDL 28/2020, on remote work; RDL 9/2021, known as the "rider" law; or RDL 32/2021 on labor reform.

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Miguel Gimeno Ribes (Valencia, 1988) studied Law (Hons), Business Administration (Hons), and Musicology. He also holds a Master of Science of Law (Hons), and a PhD in Law (Hons) from the University of Valencia. After a four-year period (2011-2015) as a Graduate Research Assistant while writing his doctoral dissertation, he joined the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance (Munich) as a Senior Research Fellow [Wissenschaftlicher Referent] (2015-2016) and worked in a research group on financial regulation [Otto-Hahn-Gruppe zur Finanzmarktregulierung], with which he continued to collaborate until 2020. Back in Spain, he has worked as an Assistant Professor (2016-2020), as a Tenured Assistant Professor (2020-2022), and as an Associate Professor [Profesor Titular] (since 2022) of Business Law at the University of Valencia. He has also been an external lecturer at Bucerius Law School (Hamburg) [2019-2022] and a Visiting Professor at the University of Trento (2023).

Funded by the DAAD, the Max Planck Society, and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, he has carried out research stays at the Universities of Munich, Oxford, and Florence, as well as at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law (Hamburg). He has also participated in the postgraduate program at Harvard Law School as a Visting Researcher (VS/VR Program). His fields of research range from contract law to corporate governance, corporate finance, M&A, and financial regulation. His research methodology focuses on comparative law.

He has written three monographs on business acquisitions (La protección del comprador en la adquisición de empresa [The buyer’s protection in business acquisitions], Granada, Comares, 2013), leveraged buyouts (Endeudamiento empresarial y fusion de Sociedades. Contribución al estudio de la fusion apalancada [Corporate indebtedness and mergers. A contribution to the study of merger leveraged buyouts], Madrid, Marcial Pons, 2015), and director compensation (Régimen jurídico de los sistemas de retribución de los administradores sociales [Systems of director compensation], Madrid, Marcial Pons, 2021), as well as a number of contributions, including articles, book chapters, and book reviews, among which “Aproximación a la naturaleza jurídica del crowdfunding” [The legal nature of crowdfunding], Revista de Derecho Mercantil, no. 291, 2014, pp. 451–490; “La exclusión voluntaria de la cotización bursátil” [Voluntary delisting from stock exchanges], Revista de Derecho Bancario y Bursátil, no. 145, 2017, pp. 91–153; “Creditor Protection and Leveraged Buyouts in Europe: A Policy Approach”, in: Bruloot, D. (Ed.), Belgian and European Perspectives on Creditor Protection in Closed Companies, Cambridge, Intersentia, 2019, pp. 197–230; “Deber de lealtad y enriquecimiento injusto” [Duty of loyalty and disgorgement], Revista de Derecho Mercantil, no. 317, 2020, pp. 117–182; “La cogestión en sociedades y grupos transfronterizos” [Codetermination in cross-border companies and groups], Revista de Derecho de Sociedades, no. 60, 2020, pp. 225–272; “Estatuto jurídico del socio-mecenas” [Crowdinvestor’s legal regime], Revista de Derecho Bancario y Bursátil, no. 160, 2020, pp. 11–68; “La sumisión a arbitraje de las modificaciones estructurales” [Arbitration of company restructurings], Cuadernos de Derecho y Comercio, no. 74, 2020, pp. 45–88; “Consejeros de la minoría, conflicto permanente y pacto omnilateral”, [Minority directors, permanent conflict, and shareholders’ agreement] Revista de Derecho de Sociedades, no. 61, 2021, pp. 391–414; (together with Paula del Val Talens) “Setting the scene: Family Firms and Closed Companies in Spain”, in: Fleischer, H./Recalde, A./Spindler, G. (Eds.), Family Firms and Closed Companies in Germany and Spain, Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck, 2021, pp. 23–64; and “Uso y desuso de las sociedades de personas” [Use and disuse of partnerships], Anuario de Derecho Civil, vol. 75, no. 1, 2022, pp. 11–67. Besides, he has co-authored a comprehensive analysis of Spanish company law in the European context, namely (together with Johannes Liefke) “Spanien” [Spain], in: Jung, S./Krebs, P./Stiegler, S. (Eds.), Gesellschaftsrecht in Europa, Baden-Baden, Nomos, 2019, pp. 1269–1402. He has also co-edited (together with José Miguel Embid Irujo and Paula del Val Talens) a commentary on the Spanish corporate governance code for listed companies (Comentario del Código de Buen Gobierno de las Sociedades Cotizadas, 2 vols, Madrid, Marcial Pons, 2025, LXXIII+1844 pp.). On those topics, he has given a number of presentations at universities and other academic forums in Europe and in America.

He is currently the leading researcher of a project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science on company law and climate change. In the past, he has been the leading researcher of two projects respectively funded by the BBVA Foundation (Shareholder activism) and by the Valencia Region (Shareholder Rights Directive II) and has been part of several research projects funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and by the Max Planck Society.

He acts as a referee for a number of Spanish law journals.

He has been a member of the Council of the European Law Institute (ELI) since 2019 and a member of the Spanish national board of European Company Case Law (ECCL).

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