Roberto Toniatti was born in Trieste on 7 March 1950. 

He graduated in Law at the University of Bologna in 1975 and worked as a research fellow at the chair of Constitutional Law at the same university until 1980, when he joined the faculty as a researcher. 

After spending a year at the Institute for Government of the University of Virginia as a Fullbright Scholar, he was called as an associate professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Trento in 1988. 

He became full professor in 1994 and was Dean of the same Faculty from 1994 to 2000 and again from 2003 to 2009. 

In the same years he directed the Research Area "Institutions and Economics" of the Istituto Trentino di Cultura (2000-2005), the Summer School on Comparative Constitutional Adjudication (CoCoA) within the Marie Curie Programme of the European Union (2006-2009) and the "Trento Workshop on European Governance" (TWEG) (2002). He co-directed with Joseph Weiler the two editions of "European Legal Integration: The New Italian Scholarship" (2005-2006 and 2007-2008). 

In the framework of the Italian national research projects PRIN, he participated in the projects on "Institutional Pluralism, Community Identities, Global Policies. Characters, variants and crisis of contemporary federalism" (1997-1999), "The development of structures and powers of the European Union as a process of constitutionalization" (2000-2002), and, as the national coordinator, in "Pluralism in the constitutional transition of the Balkans" (2005-2007), as well as in "Jurisdiction and pluralism" (2010-2011). 

Roberto Toniatti has been a visiting professor at the following universities: University College Galway, University of Delaware, Universidad de Valencia, Universidad del Pais Vasco, Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, University of Haifa (Israel), Kunmin University, Bahçesehir University in Istanbul, University of Singapore and Hong Kong University. 

From 1995 to 1998 he was a member of the "round table" of experts who developed the basis for cross-border cooperation between Trentino, Adige/Südtirol and Tyrol and is an honorary member of the Euroregional Association of Comparative and European Public Law (www.jus-euroregionale.org) which he founded together with a group of lawyers from Innsbruck, Bolzano and Trento in 2004. In 2016-2017 he was a member of Convention 33 of the Autonomous Province of Bolzano for the reform of the Statute of Autonomy.

Since 2013 he has coordinated the activities of the "Laboratory of Institutional Innovation for Integral Autonomy" at the University of Trento (www.liatn.eu).