Numerary Member
Social Sciences: Dr. in Laws
Date of admittance: 05/11/2015
Admission Speech: La utopía garantista del Derecho Penal en la nueva “Edad Media”
Fermín Morales Prats (Barcelona, 1957) holds a PhD in Law from the University of Barcelona (1983). In 1984, he was awarded the Extraordinary Doctorate Prize by the University of Barcelona for his doctoral thesis, Privacy in Spanish Criminal Law (later published as The Criminal Protection of Privacy: Privacy and Information Technology). Since 1994, he has been a Professor of Criminal Law at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Previously, he was a Professor at the Universities of Cantabria (Santander) and Lleida.
He has supervised numerous doctoral theses and participated in national and international research projects. In the 1980s and 1990s, he was a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law (Freiburg i. Br., Germany) and at the Institute for Criminology and Economic Criminal Law (University of Freiburg i. Br., Germany), under the direction of Prof. K. Tiedemann. He has also been a visiting professor at Italian universities.
He is the author of more than eighty publications in the fields of Criminal Law Theory and Criminal Policy. He is co-author and coordinator of the work Commentaries on the Spanish Penal Code, directed by Professor Gonzalo Quintero Olivares.
He is co-director of the journal Criminal Law and Procedure, published by Aranzadi, and a member of the Scientific Committee of the journal l’Indice Penale.
He is a practicing lawyer. In 1999, he was awarded the medal of the Barcelona Bar Association in recognition of his personal and professional trajectory. In subsequent years, he was honored by the International Association of Best Lawyers as the best lawyer in the area of Criminal Law in 2020 and 2024, as well as his law firm, which has been recognized from 2008 to 2024. Additionally, Fermín Morales and his professional team have been selected by Chambers Europe from 2008 to the present as one of the top law teams in the area of Dispute Resolution Corporate Crime Spain.
He was a founding member of the Spanish Union of Criminal Lawyers and is currently a member of its governing board (UEAP).
On November 5, 2015, he was appointed a Full Academic of the Royal Academy of Doctors (www.radd.eu) in Barcelona, where he delivered an inaugural address titled The Utopian Guarantee of Criminal Law in the New Middle Ages, discussing a new context of legal uncertainty fueled by what he calls the new punitive fundamentalism and the prioritization of security over justice.
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