Mexico

Abstract

Abstract This chapter explores the origins and growth of Mexican judicial review. Mexico borrowed the idea of a Supreme Court with the power of a Constitutional Court from Brazil in 1994. In addition, the rise of independent judicial review, after 2000, coincided with the rise of different parties controlling the presidency, the two houses of Congress, and the state governorships and legislatures. This created a need in Mexico for a constitutional umpire, which was filled by the emergence of independent judicial review. It also created a political environment in which governmental power was checked and balanced enough to leave political space for an active Supreme Court. There is, in addition, a rights from wrongs element to the emergence of Mexican judicial review after the end of the often-brutal PRI dictatorship.