Laura Beck Varela is Associate Professor (Profesora Titular) of History of Law at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She accomplished her PhD studies at the University of Seville and the Max Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main) and received her LL.M. and B.A. degrees from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto Alegre, Brazil. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris, 2012), the Max-Planck Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main, 2015) and the Herzog August Bibliothek (Wolfenbüttel, 2019 and 2024). 
She has taught lectures and courses at both graduate and undergraduate levels in several institutions, such as the China-EU School of Law (2010, 2011), Universidade de Lisboa (2023, 2022, 2020), Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (2014), Madrid-CSIC (2015), Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (2008, 2012), Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (2014); Fundação Getúlio Vargas, São Paulo (2019), Universitat de Valencia (2015), Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso (2023). She has been visiting professor at the Università degli studi della Tuscia (2013), Universidade Nova de Lisboa (2013) and the Université de Toulouse Jean-Jaurès (2024).
Her research fields include the intersection of legal history with book, authorship and readership studies, with a special focus on the cultural history of legal education and the censorship of legal literature in early modern Iberian spaces. Between 2004 and 2019, she was a member of the long-lasting research projects directed by Bartolomé Clavero, Historia Cultural e Institucional del Constitucionalismo en España y América (known by the acronym HICOES), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education. She is currently a member of the research project “Censura, expurgación y lectura en la primera era de la imprenta. Los índices de libros prohibidos y su impacto en el patrimonio textual” (PdC2022-133136-I00, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación), directed by María José Vega (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) and co-director, together with Knud Haakonssen and Frank Grunert, of the International Research Network ‘Natural law’ 1625-1850 (Interdisciplinary Centre for European Enlightenment Studies (IZEA), Martin Luther Universität Halle-Wittenbergt) and of the Brill book series Early Modern Natural Law: Studies & Sources.
More recently, she has explored the impact of the querelle des femmes in the field of learned jurisprudence and the various forms of ‘popularizing’ legal knowledge for women in the eighteenth century. Her publications in this field include book chapters and articles, such as: “Women Jurists? Representations of Female Intellectual Authority in Eighteenth-Century Jurisprudence”, in: Portraits & Poses: Representations of Female Intellectual Authority in Early Modern Europe, Lieke van Deinsen, Beatrijs Vanacker (eds.), Leuven University Press, 2022, pp. 281-302 (DOI 10.11116/9789461664532); “Translating Law for Women? The Institutes du Droit Civil pour les Dames in Eighteenth Century Helmstedt”, in: Rechtsgeschichte (Rg) 24 (2016), pp. 171-189, or her contribution to the Manual de Historia del Derecho coordinated by M. Lorente and J. Vallejo (Valencia, Tirant lo Blanch, 2012).