Dan Brinks
Associate Professor of Political Science; Concurrent Associate Professor of Law
Kellogg Institute Faculty Fellow
University of Notre Dame
“New Courts for New Democracies: Judicial Changes in Latin America from 1975 to 2009”
Tuesday, February 9
Abstract
A respected long-term scholar of Latin American judiciaries, Keith Rosenn, argued in 1987 that “the sad reality is that the citadel of judicial independence has been perennially besieged in Latin America.” The perception for many years has been that Latin American courts are essentially irrelevant institutions, weathervanes that simply mark whatever direction the region’s powerful executives blow. More recent analyses suggest that, even assuming that statement is mostly true, much has changed in the last few decades. The last twenty or so years have been marked by the appearance of decidedly important courts such as Costa Rica’s constitutional chamber, the Colombian Corte Constitucional, Brazil’s Supremo Tribunal Federal, Argentina’s newly active Corte Suprema de Justicia de la Nación, Chile’s suddenly awoken Corte Constitutional, Mexico’s recently emboldened Suprema Corte, and others. And yet, with limited exceptions, the explanations offered so far for the appearance of more powerful courts have been almost exclusively domestic and largely unrelated to institutional design.
This project looks at the changes in judicial institutions in Latin America during the most recent wave of democratization, measuring changes in formal judicial autonomy and authority. Building on a comprehensive original database of all new constitutions and constitutional reforms in Latin America from 1975 to 2009, we look at the possible international and domestic determinants of judicial changes. Along the way, we develop a conceptual framework for measuring the institutional attributes that seem likely to predict actual judicial power, scoring the high courts of all the countries in the region on the three crucial dimensions we argue contribute to judicial power. We apply the findings of the literature on the domestic determinants of powerful courts as well as what we have learned from the diffusion literature to explain (and question) the apparent move toward stronger courts in Latin America.
