Regina Kiener is a full Professor of Public Law at the University of Zurich. From 1982 to 1989 she studied law at the University of Bern and was admitted to the Bar of the canton of Bern in 1989. She then worked as an attorney, as a scientific assistant at the state chancellery of the Canton of Bern and at the Institute of Public Law at the University of Bern (Prof. Dr. Ulrich Zimmerli). She obtained her doctoral degree in 1994 and won the Walter Hug award for outstanding thesis with her dissertation.
She obtained her habilitation from the University of Bern in 2000 with a venia docendi in constitutional law, administrative law and procedural law. Kiener had various teaching positions at the University of Bern (1994-1996 and 2000-2001), the University of Basel (2000 and 2001) and the University of Freiburg (1999). She was a student and researcher at the University of California (Davis and Berkeley) in 1996. She was a Research Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley in 1998 and at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in 2012. In 2011, Kiener was a Visiting Professor at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.
From 2001 to 2009 she was a full Professor for Public and Administrative Law at the University of Bern. Since 2009 she has been a full Professor of Public and Administrative Law, including procedural law at the University of Zurich. In addition, she is a lecturer at the Centre of Public Management (KPM) at the University of Bern and a lecturer at the Swiss Academy of Judges.
Kiener has widely published books or contributions to books, articles in legal journals and Festschriften, regularly commented on judgments of the Swiss Federal Tribunal, contributed to major commentaries in various fields of law and been involved in several research projects of the Swiss National Research Foundation.
Kiener served as an expert for the Swiss Parliament and the Federal Administration, for cantonal and communal parliaments, governments and higher cantonal courts (on issues regarding independence of the judiciary, status of judges, human rights, refugee law, procedural law, etc.), among others: Consultant to the Federal Department of Justice, on the evaluation of the revised federal procedural law (2007-2013); consultant to OSCE / Max Planck Minerva Research Group, on Judicial Independence in Eastern Europe, South Caucasus and Central Asia (2010); consultant to the Federal Parliament Judicial Committee on the election and re-election of judges (2008, 2010); consultant to USAID on court organization in Macedonia (2004), on the status of public prosecutors in Macedonia (2005).