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

Her career as a professor, after three years as an assistant at the Faculty of Law in Paris (1967-1970), led her to teach at the universities of Lille-II (1970-1977), Paris-XI (1977-1990) and Paris-I (1990-2002). Member of the Institut Universitaire de France (1992-2002), she was elected to the Collège de France as holder of the chair of Comparative Legal Studies and Internationalization of Law (2002-2011). Mireille Delmas-Marty has been a visiting professor in most major European universities, as well as in the United States, Latin America, China, Japan and Canada.

She has received honorary doctorates from eight universities and is a member of the Royal Academy of Belgium (1990), the Universal Academy of Cultures (1999) and the American Law Institute (2012). She has chaired the Pharos Observatory of Pluralism of Cultures and Religions and the Philotechnical Association (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 teaching, Mireille Delmas-Marty has devoted herself to research, first at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the Association de Recherches Pénales Européennes, which she founded, and then at the UMR de Droit Comparé (University of Paris 1/CNRS), which she created and directed from 1997 to 2002. Since 1984, she has directed the Revue de science criminelle et de droit pénal comparé and is a member of the editorial board of various national (Archives de Politique criminelle, Revue trimestrielle des droits de l’homme) and international (European Journal of Crime, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice and Journal of International Criminal Justice) legal journals.

Finally, Mireille Delmas-Marty has acted as an expert for the President of the Republic, for the revision of the Constitution in 1992; for the Minister of Justice, for the reform of the Penal Code in 1981 and for the reform of criminal procedure in 1998; for the European Union, in the framework of the Corpus Juris criminal project (1996-1999) and of the Supervisory Committee of the Anti-Fraud Office (1999-2005); and for the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court as a special advisor (2011-2015).