ABSTRACT
The objective of this chapter is to give a broad but systematic introduction to the roles the Mexican Supreme Court has played in almost one hundred years of functioning, from 1917 to 2013. We aim at presenting an account that incorporates the political and the legal perspectives on the work of the court, establishing a dialogue within the current literature on this high tribunal. We hope it will be of interest to both students and specialists, and that it will contribute to building bridges among scholars who study the Mexican Supreme Court from different fields of knowledge. The last decade has seen an important increase in the number of studies
devoted to analyzing different aspects of the Mexican Supreme Court.1 In contrast to a not very distant past, these studies come from diverse disciplines in the social sciences and not almost exclusively from legal scholarship. For starters, there is now a series of richly descriptive empirical studies that unveil important issues and processes, such as how the justices are elected and how they decide cases (Elizondo and Magaloni 2010); how many and what type of cases the Supreme Court decides either in general (Bustillos 2009) or through specific instruments of constitutional review, such as the action of constitutionality (López Ayllón and Valladares 2009) and the constitutional controversy (Hernández 2011).2 These studies have provided fundamental information on the Supreme Court and have called attention to the basic data we still lack on central issues. There is also a series of political science studies aimed at explaining the beha-
vior of the Supreme Court Judges emphasizing the effects of different kinds of non-legal constraints on the justices’ decisions. In this vein, for instance, it has been shown that Supreme Court Judges began leveling the electoral playing field
soon after the 1994 reform (e.g. Finkel 2003), which divided government in 1997 and increased the likelihood of decisions against the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) (e.g. Ríos-Figueroa 2007), and in which party turnover in executive power in 2000 also increased the likelihood of decisions of unconstitutionality (e.g. Magaloni et al. 2011). It has also been shown that since 1995 the Supreme Court has actively sought the support of public opinion in order to build its power and authority (e.g. Staton 2004, 2010). One of the central lessons of this political science scholarship is that the Supreme Court is a strategic political actor that has concentrated its efforts on arbitrating political conflicts, downplaying its role as protector of fundamental rights (e.g. Ansolabehere 2010; Helmke and Ríos-Figueroa 2011; Magaloni et al. 2011). In part as a response to the shortcomings of political science work on the
Supreme Court, and in part because of the increasing importance of the court’s jurisprudence for policies and politics, legal scholars have begun to produce systematic jurisprudential lines on specific topics. This novel work (in Mexico) has produced specialized jurisprudential knowledge in areas such as criminal due process rights (e.g. Magaloni Kerpel and Ibarra Olguín 2008); the taxing capacity of the state and the just imposition of fiscal burdens (e.g. Elizondo and Pérez de Acha 2006); federalism (e.g. Caballero 2010); separation of powers and political representation (e.g. Carbonell and Salazar Ugarte 2006; Ibarra Cárdenas 2014); the scope and limits of sexual and reproductive freedom (e.g. Madrazo and Vela 2011; Pou Giménez 2010); and freedom of speech (e.g. Cossío, Hernández, and Mejía 2014). In terms of judicial behavior, of the central lessons of these studies is that the court is building-quite slowly, and in disparate and not always consistent ways-its understanding of the basic rules of the political game, and of the effective protection of fundamental rights.3
