ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the way Supreme Court Justices voted on the protection of fundamental rights between 2000 and 2011. The main idea is that although the constitutional and legal frameworks have a significant impact in ensuring rights in a legal system, there are also other factors that influence how judges define the meaning of their votes, mainly the political ones. So the research question is: which factors influence the way a justice votes on fundamental rights? Even though this concern has been raised in other latitudes, in the Mexican context there is no study that systematically analyzes Supreme Court rulings on fundamental rights, mainly because of a lack of data and because of the traditional way of studying judicial behavior (mainly by analyzing specific sentences). We answer this question by analyzing all individual justices’ decisions from 2000 to 2011 on suit of amparos and constitutional actions on fundamental rights. Therefore, our goal in this chapter is twofold. First, from this unpublished
database, there is an attempt to study the degree of protection of fundamental rights by the Mexican Supreme Court based on a novel concept of judicial behavior within the academy in the country. That is, the vote of justices while adjudicating cases involving fundamental rights depends on a variety of factors that are beyond the normative design of fundamental rights in the constitution. Hence, it is important to open up new versatile paths that may explain more precisely the Mexican Supreme Court. In addition, this chapter also aims to evaluate the Mexican Court Justices when protecting fundamental rights in a context of democratic transition. In fact, this is a scenario never seen before in the country, where political alternation and pluralism, together with a much more organized civil society and means of communication with greater autonomy, certainly affect the behavior of justices. The not inconsiderable questions that attempt to be answered in this text are: How? And in what way?
