Sebastián Soto

Sebastián Soto Velasco (born 13 December 1977) is a Chilean lawyer, academic and political advisor.

He was a member of the Expert Commission during the 2023 Chilean constitutional process, serving as its Vice President from 6 March 2023.

Biography He was born in Santiago in 1977, the son of Sergio Soto Meza and Sylvia Velasco Montt. On 8 May 2004, he married Rosario Willumsen Jigins, with whom he has four children.

He studied law at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, qualifying as a lawyer in 2001. He obtained a Master of Laws (LL.M) from Columbia University and a PhD in Law from the University of Chile.

Soto received a Fulbright scholarship in 2005 to participate in the Congressional Fellowship Program of the American Political Science Association, and, from 2014 to 2015, he was a visiting researcher at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University.

Professional career Soto is associate professor at the Faculty of Law of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, where he is Director of the Department of Public Law and teaches courses on Constitutional Law, Lawmaking and Legislative Technique, and the Judiciary in constitutionalism. Since 2019, he has served as a counselor of the Council of State Defense of Chile.

He was a researcher at the think tank Libertad y Desarrollo until 2010, and, from 2015 to 2017, headed its constitutional area.

During the first government of Sebastián Piñera, he served as head of the Legislative Legal Division of the Ministry General Secretariat of the Presidency. Until 2018, he worked as a consultant at Cariola Díez Pérez-Cotapos law firm.

In 2019, he participated in the Technical Constitutional Committee that transformed the “Agreement for Peace and a New Constitution” into the bill that became Law No. 21.200.

In January 2023, he was appointed by the Senate of Chile as a member of the Expert Commission for the 2023 Chilean constitutional process. Within the commission, he joined the Subcommission on Political System, Constitutional Reform and Form of State, and was elected Vice President of the Expert Commission on 6 March 2023.