After studying law in Paris, Mireille Delmas-Marty obtained her doctorate (1969), then the agrégation in private law and criminal sciences (1970).

After three years as an assistant at the Paris Faculty of Law (1967-1970), she went on to teach at the universities of Lille-II (1970-1977), Paris-XI (1977-1990) and Paris-I (1990-2002). A member of the Institut Universitaire de France (1992-2002), she was elected to the Collège de France as holder of the Chair in Comparative Legal Studies and the Internationalization of Law (2002-2011). Mireille Delmas-Marty has been a visiting professor at most major European universities, as well as in the USA, Latin America, China, Japan and Canada.

Doctor honoris causa of 8 universities, she is a member of the Académie royale de Belgique (1990), the Académie universelle des cultures (1999) and the American Law Institute (2012). She has chaired the Observatoire Pharos du pluralisme des cultures et des religions and the Association philotechnique (2011-2017), and was a member of the Board of Directors of the French Commission for UNESCO (2014-2017). She is a Grand Officer in the National Order of Merit (2003) and in the Order of the Legion of Honor (2016).

In addition to her lectures, Mireille Delmas-Marty has devoted much of her time to research, first at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the Association de Recherches Pénales Européennes she founded, then at the UMR de Droit Comparé (Université de Paris 1/CNRS) she created and directed from 1997 to 2002. Since 1984, she has been editor of the Revue de science criminelle et de droit pénal comparé, and sits on the editorial boards of both national (Archives de Politique criminelle, Revue trimestrielle des droits de l'homme) and international legal journals (European Journal of Crime, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice and Journal of International Criminal Justice).

Mireille Delmas-Marty has also acted as an expert, notably : to the President of the Republic, for the revision of the Constitution in 1992 ; to the Minister of Justice, for the reform of the Penal Code in 1981 and for the reform of criminal procedure in 1998 ; to the European Union, as part of the so-called Corpus Juris criminal project (1996-1999) and the Supervisory Committee of the Anti-Fraud Office (1999-2005) ; and to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court as Special Advisor (2011-2015).

Mireille Delmas-Marty passed away on February 12 2022.