Courts in Latin America

To what extent do courts in Latin America protect individual rights and limit governments? This book answers these fundamental questions by bringing together today's leading scholars of judicial politics. Drawing on examples from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Bolivia, the authors demonstrate that there is widespread variation in the performance of Latin America's constitutional courts. In accounting for this variation, the contributors push forward ongoing debates about what motivates judges; whether institutions, partisan politics, and public support shape interbranch relations; and the importance of judicial attitudes and legal culture. The authors deploy a range of methods, including qualitative case studies, paired country comparisons, statistical analysis, and game theory.

Gretchen Helmke is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Rochester. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2000. She has received fellowships from the Weatherhead Center for International and Area Studies at Harvard University, the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. She has published two books: Courts under Constraints: Judges, Generals, and Presidents in Argentina (2005) and Informal Institutions and Democracy: Lessons from Latin America (coedited with Steven Levitsky; 2006). She has also published numerous articles in leading political science journals on comparative political institutions, the rule of law, and Latin American politics.

Julio Ríos-Figueroa is Assistant Professor in the Division of Political Studies at Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas in Mexico City. He received his Ph.D. from New York University (NYU) in 2006. He was a Hauser Research Scholar at the NYU School of Law during the academic year 2006–2007. He has published articles on the rule of law, Latin American politics, and the emergence and performance of judicial institutions in journals such as Comparative Politics, Journal of Latin American Studies, Comparative Political Studies, and Latin American Politics and Society. He is currently working on a book project on the judicial construction of due process rights in Latin America.

Gretchen Helmke

University of Rochester, Department of Political Science

Julio Ríos-Figueroa

Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, División de Estudios Políticos

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First published 2011
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Contents

Contributors

Daniel M. Brinks

Andrea Castagnola

Rebecca Bill Chávez

Javier Couso

John A. Ferejohn

Gretchen Helmke

Lisa Hilbink

Diana Kapiszewski

Beatriz Magaloni

Eric Magar

Aníbal Pérez-Liñán

Julio Ríos-Figueroa

Juan Carlos Rodríguez-Raga

Arianna Sánchez

Druscilla Scribner

Jeffrey K. Staton

Barry R. Weingast

Bruce M. Wilson

Acknowledgments

This book originates from a conference we organized at Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) in Mexico City from March 5 to March 8, 2008. The conference was made possible thanks to generous financial support from CIDE, the Mexican Supreme Court (Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nación), and the Mexican Electoral Tribunal (Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federació).

We want to especially express our gratitude and acknowledgments to the ministers of the Mexican Supreme Court and the magistrates of the Electoral Tribunal for their openness to and enthusiasm for an academic project conceived of and developed by political scientists. We hope that this book presents in an accessible manner the theories and empirical findings that this discipline has produced on courts in Latin America. It is also our hope that the book lays the foundation for building bridges and opportunities for further interdisciplinary research.

We also want to single out those individuals whose support and hard work were crucial for the realization of the conference and the book. From the Mexican Supreme Court, we especially thank Víctor Manuel Castro Borbón, Alfonso Oñate Laborde, María Antonieta Segura, and Paulina Velasco. From the Electoral Tribunal, Enrique Ochoa Reza and Octavio Ramos never lost faith in the project. From CIDE, the institution that hosted the conference and has given us continuous support, we particularly thank Sergio López Ayllón, José Antonio Caballero, and Ignacio Marván Laborde. We are also grateful to Yolanda Lamothe, Judith Nieto, and Jorge Puma. Julio Ríos-Figueroa wishes to thank especially Andrea Pozas-Loyo for her encouragement and indispensable help throughout the process, from the conception of the project to the decision on the picture for the book cover. Finally, we want to acknowledge the extraordinary work of our editor, John Berger, of Wendy Bedenbaugh for designing the book cover, and of Brigitte Coulton, who served as project manager for the book.

The chapters in this book benefited enormously from the rich discussions that we had during the conference at CIDE. The extraordinary group of participants in the conference included: Karina Ansolabehere, Daniel Brinks, John Carey, Andrea Castagnola, Rebecca Bill Chávez, Javier Couso, Pilar Domingo, Jodi Finkel, Héctor Fix-Fierro, María Amparo Hernández, Lisa Hilbink, Silvia Inclán, Matthew Ingram, Diana Kapiszewski, Ana Laura Magaloni, Beatriz Magaloni, Eric Magar, Mariana Magaldi de Sousa, Jacqueline Martínez, Raúl Mejía, Gabriel Negretto, Aníbal Pérez-Liñán, Xisca Pou Giménez, Juan Carlos Rodríguez-Raga, Arianna Sánchez, Andreas Schedler, Druscilla Scribner, Rachel Sieder, Catalina Smulovitz, Jeffrey K. Staton, Matthew M. Taylor, and Bruce M. Wilson.

During the conference, the Mexican Supreme Court hosted a welcome dinner for the participants of the conference in the magnificent patio de murales, a space in the Supreme Court building surrounded by the murals that Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco (1883–1949) painted between 1940 and 1941. The cover of this book shows an image from one of those murals, entitled The Struggle of the Workers (La lucha de los trabajadores). The mural shows an open door – the main door of the Supreme Court – that separates two groups of workers fighting for their rights: some are inside the Court and some outside. If one looks closely, it is possible to distinguish on the left-hand side of the door the face of a shouting worker who is half in and half out of the Court. Compared with Orozco's other murals in the Supreme Court building, where his representations of the goddess of Justice and the Courts of Law are clearly more skeptical and even contemptuous, La lucha de los trabajadores presents a more complex picture: it implies that the workers’ struggle is conducted not only in the streets but also in the courtrooms. Why did only some workers decide to cross the door? Did they do so when they expected their rights to be defended by the law? And, to what extent was the law responsive? These are just some of the questions that this book addresses.