INTRODUCTION

Mexico shares many traits with other Latin America new democracies, both in terms of social, economic, and cultural background and in terms of the institutional and regulatory options taken by its formal constitutional system. The country, however, pulls out from regional common trends in a number of conspicuous dimensions. Thus, in contrast with its southern neighbors, it transitioned to democracy without enacting a new Constitution. Mexico's legal path is marked by piecemeal and continuous reformism, and today its legal and institutional framework is a complex mix of last-generation tools interacting with nineteenth- and twentieth-century legacies.

In this chapter, in describing the decision-making protocol of the Mexican Supreme Court and in more generally analyzing the way it communicates and builds its relations with the press and the wider community, we will encounter this distinctive superimposition of old and new. Thus, as we will see, the Mexican Supreme Court is – together with the Supreme Federal Tribunal of Brazil – the originator of a most interesting new development in comparative constitutional law: it has decided to go public on judicial deliberations. While the principle of “open justice” has been known for long and the right to have a public trial in the criminal domain is standardly recognized, the specific stage when Justices debate on the merits and ponder out how they will vote is generally kept outside the public eye. Even courts that hold public audiences and are wholly transparent with regards to which Justice has voted what, still keep the deliberation stage in secrecy. The Plenary Chamber of the Mexican court, by contrast, not only broadcasts the deliberations, but also makes their written transcript permanently available on the website and even publishes, in politically salient cases, the drafts to be discussed.

It is clear that in generating these developments – supplemented with nonjurisdictional initiatives destined to cultivate a particular “institutional image” – the Court wishes to send a very powerful signal: a message of transparency and openness that is easily associated to a commitment to increase trust and build up social and political legitimacy. The way the system actually works in Mexico, however, cannot be understood without having due regard to many other elements of social, legal, and institutional context.