ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on post-genesis trajectories of judicial institutions, and explores if the inclusion of new courts, rights, and rights enforcement mechanisms in Colombia’s 1991 Constitution, in conjunction with the abolition of parliamentary immunity for Members of Congress, set in motion path-dependent developments. Contrasting two scandals involving the criminalization of Colombia’s Congress, the chapter finds that judicial institutions do not evolve in the linear fashion that classical conceptualizations of path dependence suggest, but rather involve discursive trajectories of institutional change that retain an openness to incremental change.
