About the Provost

Provost Jenny Martinez previously served as Dean of Stanford Law School from April 2019 to September 2023. She is a leading expert on international law and constitutional law, including comparative constitutional law. She is the author of The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law (Oxford University Press, 2012) and numerous articles in leading academic journals.

She joined the Stanford faculty in 2003, and has taught courses on constitutional law, international law, and human rights. She has also been a senior fellow (by courtesy) of Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a faculty affiliate of Stanford’s Center on International Security and Cooperation and Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.

An experienced human rights lawyer, she has worked on numerous cases involving international law and constitutional law issues, and she has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. She previously served as a member of the U.S. State Department’s Advisory Committee on International Law. She is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Law Institute.

Before joining the Stanford faculty, Martinez clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer (BA ’59) of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit; she was also an 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 received her B.A. in History from Yale University and her J.D. from Harvard Law School.