Member Profile

As a law practitioner, Mr. Guzmán-Ariza has long and in-depth experience in servicing the needs of the international investor in the Dominican Republic, especially in the areas of Civil Law and Real Estate Law.

Currently, Mr. Guzmán-Ariza is arbitrator at the Santo Domingo Chamber of Commerce and at the Santiago Chamber of Commerce in the Dominican Republic.

Guzmán Ariza is a 30-attorney law firm located in the Dominican Republic, with seven offices covering every major business and tourism centre in the country: the Santo Domingo metropolitan area; the southeast – Punta Cana, Bávaro, Miches, Macao and La Romana, including Casa de Campo and Bayahibe; and the northern part of the island – Sosúa, Cabarete, Cabrera, Las Terrenas and Samaná. Founded in 1927, the firm has concentrated its practice since 1985 in servicing the business and personal needs of international clients.

The firm is client-focused and full-service. Intent on servicing the needs of international clients, our multilingual attorneys and business consultants are equipped to help you, in both business and personal matters, across a wide variety of practice areas, including but not limited to Corporate and Business, Mergers and Acquisitions, Project Finance, Banking, Insurance and Securities, Taxation.Intellectual Property, Litigation, Real Estate and Condominiums, Criminal Law, Immigration, and Family Law and Individual Legal Services. Also, our lawyers have regularly served as experts on the laws of the Dominican Republic in foreign jurisdictions.

Mr. Guzmán Ariza is graduate of the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra (LL.B., summa cum laude, 1981) and holds a degree of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Science and Humanities (1973).

Mr. Guzmán-Ariza has written extensively on Dominican law and Spanish legal language. He is the author of The Procedure by Default in Civil and Commercial Matters, The Language of the Dominican Constitution and Memoirs of a Small-Town Lawyer; and co-author of Company Forms, the Dictionary of Dominican Spanish, Linguistic Sex Discrimination and Double Gender, among others. Also, he translated to English the Constitution of the Dominican Republic.

- Member of the Royal Spanish Academy (Real Academia Española)

- Numerary member of the Dominican Academy of Letters (Academia Dominicana de la Lengua).

- Member of the Dominican Institute of Procedural Law (Instituto Dominicano de Derecho Procesal).

- Member of the Dominican Law Academy (Academia Dominicana del Derecho).

- Founding member of the Dominican Bar Association (Colegio de Abogados de la República Dominicana).

Fabio J. Guzmán-Ariza is president of the Editorial Board of Gaceta Judicial, the leading legal journal in the Dominican Republic and moderator since 1998 of the DR1 Legal Forum, the oldest and most popular legal forum available on Dominican law.