Nina Cernat graduated from the law department of the Moldovan State University in 1993, but according to her CV, her career in the judiciary system started 12 years earlier: she worked as a registrar at the Ialoveni Court.

In 1990, she was appointed a judge at the Botanica District Court in Chisinau, and in 1996 she got transferred to the Chisinau Tribunal. In 2001, Mrs. Cernat’s status of magistrate was updated to service till the age limit and, the same year, she was transferred to the Chisinau Court of Appeals. Two years later, Mrs. Cernat got promoted to a member of the Supreme Court of Justice, being elected later as deputy chairwoman of this institution and chief of the Panel for Civil and Administrative Litigation. In 2012, she was transferred to the Chisinau Court of Appeals, and in 2017 she joined the Higher Council of Magistrates (CSM).

In 2018, the president at that time, Igor Dodon, awarded Nina Cernat the "Glory of Labor" order for her "long and prodigious work in the field of jurisprudence." In spite of this honor, in January 2020, the Intelligence and Security Service (SIS) filed a report for the prosecutor-general – which was published in November 2021 – with content that raised questions about the judge's integrity. SIS said there were discrepancies between the official revenues and real expenses of the given magistrate and her family, pointing subtly that it was an "indicator of illicit enrichment". SIS filed a similar report regarding CMS member Dorel Musteata, a colleague of Mrs. Cernat.

Later, the Anticorruption Prosecutor's Office (PA) denied the existence of such a report among its files but assured that the "circumstances exposed in the SIS document" would be investigated. In December 2021, PA announced that no criminal prosecution would start concerning Nina Cernat and that the case was closed. "We found that the allegations against Cernat and Musteata would not fall under the definition of criminal offense as stated in the Penal Code," anticorruption prosecutors explained in a release.