ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the Constitutional Court’s decision to bar Uribe from another potential term in office constituted as an objective increase of judicial power. The outcome in this case was the result of a process of norm creation—the process by which a doctrine attains legal validity in a juridical context. The “substitution doctrine” increased the Court’s powers to review constitutional reforms by means of a reinterpretation of norms enshrined in the 1991 Constitution. Principled legal reasoning and the institutionalization of deliberative structures within the court, as supposed to utilitarian strategizing, better explains this augmentation of authority. This chapter will trace the evolution of the substitution doctrine jurisprudence together with data on Uribe’s popularity, his majorities in Congress, and the specific votes for the legislative projects in both chambers of Congress. This will show that the Constitutional Court deliberately, and deliberatively, planted, developed, and eventually affirmed the substitution doctrine against the excessive constitutional reformism of the Uribe administration.
