The Argentine Constitution was enacted in 1853, and the country's founding fathers drafted it essentially along the lines of the American Constitution. Like its model, it provides for a strict separation of powers between the three branches of government, the Executive, Legislative, and Judiciary. In the matter at stake, it vests the legislative power of the Nation in a bicameral Congress, and it grants to the Judiciary, formed by a Supreme Court and those inferior tribunals as Congress may establish, the power to “to hear and decide all cases arising under the Constitution and the laws of the Nation.” On the basis of this clause, it has been held that courts are not allowed to render any decision or opinion outside the boundaries of a specific case.

According to the Constitution, the Argentine Supreme Court has limited original jurisdiction in cases involving the Provinces, foreign ministers, and other diplomats, whereas its appellate jurisdiction is regulated by law within the constitutional boundaries of federal jurisdiction.

Since its inception in 1862, the Argentine Supreme Court, following U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall's reasoning in Marbury v. Madison, has adopted the American model of judicial review, according to which all courts, federal or provincial and of all levels, have the right to declare an act of Congress, or an action of the Executive, unconstitutional and therefore inapplicable in the case at stake.