Marta Rodriguez de Assis Machado

Full-time professor at FGV Sao Paulo Law School since 2007. Associate Dean of the Academic Master’s and PhD Programs from 2019 to 2022.
Master (2004) and PhD (2007) in Philosophy and Theory of Law from the University of Sao Paulo. During her PhD, she was a visiting researcher at Barcelona University (Philosophy of Law Department) and at Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security, and Law. Postdoctoral fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin (funded by Capes) and the Center for Latin American Studies at UC Berkeley. Visiting professor at the University of Toronto and at Columbia Law School (2017). She is currently a senior researcher at CEBRAP; global fellow at the Centre on Law & Social Transformation (University of Bergen); Fellow at the International Reproductive and Sexual Health Law Program, University of Toronto School; associate researcher at the Oxford Human Rights Hub; and one of the main investigators at Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America - MECILA.
Her research lies in the interdisciplinary field of Law and Legal-Sociology, and focuses on the relations between social movements and Law. She is particularly interested in investigating the ambivalent and disputable role that Law plays in this relation. She is currently working in the fields of sexual and reproductive rights; racial violence, protest policing, and police accountability.
She has recently published the papers “Constitutionalizing abortion in Brazil”; “Anti-racism legislation in Brazil: the role of the Courts in reproducing the myth of racial democracy”, both in the Journal of Constitutional Research; and “The battle over abortion rights in Brazil's state arenas 1995-2006” on the Harvard Health and Human Rights Journal. In the legal field, her work focuses on legal theory and criminal law. The books “Risk Society and Criminal Law, an evaluation of new legal-political trends” (2005); “Legal theory and conflict: a critical perspective of legal rationality” (2012); and the edited volume “Responsibility and Penalty in Democratic Rule of Law: theoretical challenges, public policies and the development of democracy” (2016) reflects on how new phenomena are challenging and re-shaping the criminal law field.