Maria Lúcia Amaral was born in Angola in 1957.

She is a Full Professor at Nova School of Law, where she has taught Constitutional Law, Comparative Public Law, History of Political Ideas, Fundamental Rights, Constitutional Justice and Legal Methodology.

She has a law degree from the University of Lisbon (1980) where she subsequently pursued a post-graduate course in Legal and Political Sciences (1987) and obtained her PhD in Constitutional Law (1998), having also taught several courses within the area of Public Law.

She was a recipient of scholarships from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Heidelberg, Germany) and from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Constitutional Court, Rome).

She is a member of several public law societies and has devoted most of her research work over the years to topics in constitutional law and theory.

She was elected by Parliament to the Portuguese Constitutional Court on 29th March 2007. She was Vice-President of the Constitutional Court from October 2012 to July 2016. On 2nd December 2021 she was sworn in as Ombudsperson for a second term. She had first been elected to that role on 20th October 2017.