Federica Coppola

Federica Coppola teaches criminal law at IE University Law School in Madrid. Before joining IE, she was Senior Researcher in the Dept. of Criminal Law at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security, and Law in Freiburg.  From 2017 to 2020, she was Robert A. Burt Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at Columbia University in New York and a postdoctoral scholar at Columbia’s Social Relations Lab & the Center for Justice.

She holds a PhD in Law from the European University Institute (2017). Federica’s work explores how law, behavioral science, and lived experience can work together to make penal and prison systems more humane. She is the author of two monographs —“The Real Pain of Punishment: Prison, Belonging, and the Quest for Humanized Justice” (Cambridge University Press, 2026 [forthcoming]) and “The Emotional Brain and the Guilty Mind: Novel Paradigms of Culpability and Punishment” (Hart Publishing 2021)— and the co-editor of “Social Rehabilitation and Criminal Justice” (Routledge 2024).