Legal Culture, Sociopolitical Origins and Professional Careers of Judges in Mexico

Azul A. Aguiar Aguilar

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9783031529085
• eBook ISBN: 9783031529092
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the careers, professional trajectories and legal cultures of judges in the federal judiciary in Mexico. So far, there has been limited research on internal factors contributing to the understanding of judicial power dynamics in Mexico and other Latin American countries at large; this Work fills an important gap in the literature through its empirical investigation of internal legal cultures and judicial norms, offering new data, measurement strategies,and insights into the interactions between law, politics, norms, legal culture(s), as well as judicial behavior. Utilising an original survey, the chapters analyse judicial conceptualizations of role norms, legal cultures, proclivities for judicial activism, and judicial behavior. In so doing, this book contributes to understanding of underlying key internal factors of judicial activism or restraint, in turn moving forward the debate that seeks to explain judicial behavior reliant on internal and ideational perspectives. Complementing limited but existing studies of judicial politics in Mexico through its analysis of judges beyond those that sit at the Supreme Court, this book will be of particular interest to Latin-American judicial politics scholars due to its focus on the judicial power from internal perspectives as well as sub-national judges, filling a void in the literature vis-à-vis the study of courts in Latin America. This Work was originally written in Spanish, and the translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence. A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction. Unveiling the Judiciary: An Inside Perspective
• 2. Judicial Politics in Mexico: Understanding the Legal Culture of Judges
• 3. Studying the Judicial Elites: A Methodological Approach
• 4. Who Inhabits the Federal Judiciary? Sociopolitical Origins and Professional Trajectories of the Judicial Elite
• 5. The Internal Dynamics of the Judiciary: Recruitment and Judicial Career
• 6. The Legal Culture of the Judicial Elites in Mexico
• 7. Concluding Remarks: The Judiciary—A Privileged, Nepotistic, and Formalistic Institution?
• Back Matter