Latin American Courts Going Public: A Comparative Assessment of the Regional Trend

Recently, Latin American highest courts have engaged in institutional innovations that promote the inclusion of civil society or broad interest groups in their judicial decision-making. These institutional arrangements seek either the active or passive integration of third parties through mechanisms as public hearings, amicus curiae, or the use of social media. Compared globally, Latin American courts are among the most active ones in going public. In this paper, we first present a mapping of the mechanisms that 18 Latin American highest courts have been using to engage with the public during the last three decades. Second, we develop a typology of courts’ engagement with the public considering both the kind of mechanisms implemented as well as the intensity of their use. Third, using a sample of five countries whose courts have been pioneering in going public – Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico – we explore two possible explanations for this court behavior: From a strategic perspective, courts may engage with the public in order to increase their level of public support and, thus, to improve their stance before the other branches of government. From an ideational perspective, the courts’ engagement with the public may be a consequence of the arrival of new ideas about judicial roles to the bench. Such ideational change may be the result of reforms in appointment procedures or from the rise of leftist governments in the early 2000s. Both may have promoted the appointment of a less traditional type of judges.