Ugo Mattei is Distinguished Professor of Law, and Alfred and Hanna Fromm Chair in International and Comparative Law at UC Hastings College of Law in San Francisco, California.  He attended Law School of the University of Torino, J.D. (1983); UC Berkeley School of Law, LL.M., Fulbright Fellow (1989); and the London School of Economics Faculté Internationale de Droit Comparé, Strasbourg. He has been a visiting scholar at Yale Law School and the University of Cambridge (Trinity College and Wolfson College), and a visiting professor at Oslo, Berkeley, Montpellier, and Macau.

In 1985 he joined the law school of the University of Trento as an assistant professor and he received tenure as a full professor in 1990. In 1992 he was appointed as a professor in the Faculte' Internationale de Droit Compare' (Strasbourg), where he served for four years. In 1994 he was appointed to the Hastings faculty as the first holder of the Fromm Chair in International and Comparative Law, succeeding R.B. Schlesinger in teaching Comparative Law. He also teaches Political Economy of Law. In 1997 he accepted a call from the University of Turin, Faculty of Law to succeed the famous Italian scholar Rodolfo Sacco as the Chair of Civil Law.

He is a full member of the International Academy of Comparative Law, a Fellow at the European Law Institute, served as a member of the Executive Editorial Board of the American Journal of Comparative Law, is a founding editor of Global Jurist, a general editor to the Common Core of European Private Law since its beginning in 1993, and serves as the Academic Coordinator of the International University College of Turin.

He serves advisory roles in many academic institutions including the Friburg Institute of Comparative Law, the Austrian and the Romanian Societies of Comparative Law and the Institute of Law, Economics and Finances at Copenhagen Business School. He recently masterminded, as lawyer and an activist, the Italian campaign against the privatization of water, which was successfully completed in June 2011 with a national referendum in which more than 27 million Italians voted to endorse Professor Mattei’s scheme to recognize water as a common.

Professor Mattei's work is highly interdisciplinary. He has published eighteen books and more than one hundred other publications in English, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Ukrainian. His most recent book, published in Italian, a manifesto for the commons, providing the theoretical basis for the current wave of resistance against neoliberalism in Italy, has reached the eights edition in just six months.