Jenny S. Martinez ’97, a scholar of international law and constitutional law, has been named dean of Stanford Law School. She will assume her new position April 1.
A leading expert on the role of courts and tribunals in advancing human rights, Martinez joined Stanford Law School as a faculty member in 2003, served as associate dean for curriculum from 2013 to 2016, and in 2018 chaired a key working group that developed a plan to advance diversity and inclusion in the school. She is the author of “The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law” and numerous articles in leading academic journals.
Martinez joins a number of Harvard Law School alumni currently serving as law school deans, including Harvard Law School Dean John F. Manning ’85; University of Chicago Law School Dean Thomas J. Miles ’03 ; University of Pennsylvania Law School Dean Theodore Ruger ’95; University of Florida Levin College of Law Dean Laura Rosenbury ’97; CUNY School of Law Dean Mary Lu Bilek ’80; and University of California Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky ’78.
Martinez earned a B.A. from Yale University in 1993 and a J.D. from Harvard Law in 1997. She served as a managing editor of the Harvard Law Review. She clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer ’64 and Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Martinez was associate legal officer for Judge Patricia Wald of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague, where she worked on trials involving genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
She is a member of the American Law Institute and serves as a member of the U.S. State Department’s Advisory Committee on International Law.