Packing Courts Seriously: the 2024 Mexican Judicial Overhaul and the Transitional Challenges of Future Unpacking

In 2024, the MORENA party in Mexico mustered its controversially gained supermajority to introduce several dispositions to the hyper-amended Mexican Constitution. Having previously clashed through six years with the Judiciary, MORENA finally managed a takeover. The Constitution reconfigured the Supreme Court, handling de facto the ability to appoint all new Justices to the ruling party, terminated the office of all Federal Judges and Magistrates through two staggered periods ending in 2027, and terminated the office of all state Apex Court judges, introducing a partisan system of elections to replace them, relying primarily on candidates proposed by Congress and the President. An ordinary political calculation allows foreseeing that MORENA will win by a landslide at the vast majority, if not all, of the contested Judgeships. Such a large-scale packing in a single stroke is unprecedented for the region. This paper explains the implication of such a recent episode for judicial independence. It further argues that given the high likelihood of the amendments being implemented by 2027, even an improbable immediate victory of the opposition would mean future governments coexisting with an entirely packed judicial branch both at the state and federal levels, posing systemic challenges of constitutional repair rather than specific measures of single Court-Unpacking.