In contrast, since the reform came into force in 1995, it has been the arena in which more than two thousand constitutional cases have been ultimately settled. During the period 1917-1994, the Supreme Court adjudicated only 63 constitutional cases of its exclusive jurisdiction.
The operation of this more compact and powerful body was left in charge of 11 justices nominated by Zedillo.
In 1994, four days after taking office, Ernesto Zedillo, the last president to govern Mexico emerging from the once hegemonic National Revolutionary Party, promoted a major redesign of the Supreme Court of Justice that substantially expanded its constitutional review powers and reduced its size from 26 to 11 members. The paper intends to show, then, that inherited institutional structures and practices -which are often traceable far in the past- hinder the adequate performance of the roles and functions the Supreme Court of Mexico will be called to play in these incoming years. This trait -that I call "decisional fuzziness" is linked, I contend, to features of internal and external institutional design of the court. In it, I describe remarkable changes in the Supreme Court performance over these last years (markedly, how it has partly set aside traditional views and has started to protect people's rights) but I argue that it confronts serious problems to articulate and publicly transmit a minimally coherent and understandable set of legal criteria.
This is a chapter that will be published in a book about the role of the Supreme Court of Mexico in the process of democratic consolidation in the country. Forthcoming in Andrea Castagnola and Saúl López-Noriega (eds.): Judicial Politics in Mexico: The Supreme Court and the Transition to Democracy.
0 kommentar(er)
