María Dolores de Cospedal (Madrid, 1965) has, since 2021, been Deputy Chair of the Elcano Royal Institute, of which she had previously been a member for over four years. She became a Government Lawyer in 1991 and was employed as such in the province of Vizcaya and in the Ministries of Public Works, Transport and the Environment, Social Affairs, Labour and Social Security, in addition to serving in the European Court of Human Rights and the Spanish Supreme Court. She was a labour and social affairs counsellor at the Spanish Embassy in the US and was the Spanish representative for labour and social affairs at the Organisation of American States and Spanish representative in the team of jurists at the Council of Europe preparing the European Code of Administrative Law.
She became Technical General Secretary of the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs and Undersecretary of the Ministries of Public Administration and the Interior and was subsequently in charge of Public Works and Transport in the Madrid Regional Government.
She has been chair or director at a number of boards of both public and private companies and been a professor and lecturer in public and private bodies and entities on the subject of Public Administration, as well as in postgraduate and master’s degrees on Administrative Law, Procedural Law and Public Procurement. She has served as Premier of the Autonomous Community of Castilla-La Mancha and as Minister of Defence, while she is currently Chair of the Security and Defence Law Section of the Madrid Bar Association and a senior partner in the law firm CMS-Albiñana y Suárez de Lezo.