Patricia Cruz Marín is a Mexican lawyer and political scientist pursuing a J.S.D. at Yale Law School, where she also earned her LL.M. in 2020. Since 2022, she has worked as an attorney at the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL), litigating emblematic cases before the Inter-American Commission and Court of Human Rights. She also teaches Constitutional Law at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where she has served as a professor since 2021. Her career bridges high-level human rights advocacy, legal education, and empirical research focused on Latin America.
Her scholarly interests include compliance and implementation of international human rights decisions, reparations in contexts of mass human rights violations, regional accountability mechanisms, and critical approaches to legal education. Her dissertation, "From Compliance to Impact: The Relevance of the Inter-American System of Human Rights," develops empirical tools to analyze the effectiveness and transformative potential of regional human rights litigation from a victim-centered and institutional perspective.
Her doctoral committee includes Professors Tom R. Tyler (chair), Oona Hathaway, Michael Reisman, and James Cavallaro.
Patricia holds an LL.B. from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and a B.A. in Political Science from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM), both awarded with highest honors. Her most recent publications are the articles Compliance to Impact: Assessing the Effectiveness of Strategic Litigation in Cases of Forced Disappearance at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights," (Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law , 2024) and “More than Lack of Capacity: Active Impunity in Mexico” (Human Rights Quarterly, 2023), co-authored with James Cavallaro and Alejandro Anaya.
Doctoral Committee
Tom Tyler (chair), Oona Hathaway, Michael Reisman, and James Cavallaro
Education
LL.M., Yale Law School (2020)
B.A., Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (2019)
LL.B., Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (2018)
Contact information
Email: patricia.cruzmarin@yale.edu | pacruma@gmail.com | patricia.cruzmarin@derecho.unam.mx