Carlos Bernal is a professor of law at the University of Dayton School of Law and at the University of La Sabana in Bogotá, Colombia, and serves as commissioner at the Interamerican Human Rights Commission. From 2017 to 2020 he was a justice at the Colombian Constitutional Court.

Bernal earned his LL.B. in 1996 from the University Externado of Colombia (Bogotá). He additionally holds an S.J.D. awarded in 2001 from the University of Salamanca (Spain) and an MA awarded in 2008 and PhD awarded in 2011 in Philosophy from the University of Florida (USA). His research focuses on constitutional rights’ interpretation, comparative constitutional change, international law, general jurisprudence — in particular, on the intersection between social ontology and legal theory, and the philosophical foundations of tort law. His work has been published in highly ranked peer-reviewed journals, books, and edited collections in English, Spanish, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, and Russian.