Mexico's Supreme Court: Between Liberal Individual and Revolutionary Social Rights, 1867-1934

4: The Third Revolutionary Court and Legal Obstacles to the Implementation of Article 27

75 Chapter Four The Third Revolutionary Court and Legal Obstacles to the Implementation of Article 27 › The Court, by a brilliant jurisprudence, has juridically consecrated the rights conquered by the Revolution in favor of the workers; but it has not been able to do the same for the campesinos, for diverse reasons of resistance to the implementation of the most transcendental social program of the Revolution, which is the agrarian question. —Arturo Cisneros Canto, 1928 In an address prepared for the Academy of Legislation and Jurisprudence and read on January 13, 1931, Luis Cabrera estimated that, “prior to 1928, more than five thousand amparos have accumulated in the Supreme Court” against the agrarian reform.1 Moreover, we know from an address to the Court by Justice Guzmán Vaca in 1928 that these amparos were being conceded at a rate approximating 75 percent.2 These numbers are given in general terms, but taken together they give us a sense of the impasse that had developed between the Supreme Court, on the one hand, and the agrarian authorities, on the other, during the four-year term of President Calles. More than any other issue, the new Supreme Court’s increasing propensity after 1923 to grant judicial protection to landowners against the provisional land grant decrees of state governors and the definitive land grant decrees of the federal executive branch (known as dotación) seems to have facilitated the 1928 renovation of the very Court whose members, according to the Constitution, were now meant to be enjoying the guarantee 76 Chapter four of lifetime tenure. This was done as part of a sweeping set of constitutional reforms (also intended to fix a backlog problem of crisis proportions) to articles 94 and 96–100 initiated by Obregón on the eve of his reelection to a second (but nonconsecutive) presidential term. Although this constitutional amendment of 1928 seems to have tipped the balance in favor of those most committed to a radical shift in the Court’s agrarian jurisprudence , it was not until the passage of two other amendments in 1931 and 1934 that Supreme Court intervention in this matter ceased to be an obstacle for the implementation of the agrarian reform and consequently an occasion for conflict with the executive branch. The 1931 constitutional amendment to article 10 of the agrarian law of January 6, 1915, proved especially far reaching and completely barred those adversely affected by the redistribution of land from seeking redress in the courts. It may seem strange that a change to a preconstitutional law followed all of the requirements of a constitutional amendment, but this paradox is easily explained once it is recognized that the Court’s agrarian jurisprudence , elaborated in the following pages, had interpreted this law as having been raised to the level of constitutional law by article 27. According to the new article 10, however, “property owners affected by resolutions of dotación [land grants] and restitution [of usurped land] will not have any right or legal recourse, whether ordinary or the extraordinary one of amparo.”3 This amendment was to be repealed shortly after the massive acceleration of land redistributions carried out by President Lázaro Cárdenas, but it nonetheless represents an unprecedented suspension of what nineteenth-century jurisprudence had come to regard as one of the most important mechanisms guaranteeing the legality of a constitutional regime, namely judicial oversight through amparo. As in the case of labor, a judge-made solution to problems generated around the implementation of the new social legislation required a significant reversal of principles related to past precedent and especially those principles related to a previous understanding of the judicial power’s relation to the administrative branch of government. Unlike labor, however, the Court’s jurisprudence was heavily influenced by the way the agrarian reform came to be regulated at the federal level by the executive and legislative branches, a factor that also seems to have mitigated against a judge-made solution prior to the judicial reforms of 1928. It is the continuity of legislative deference checked by a concern for judicial control that ultimately 77 Third Revolutionary Court and Legal Obstacles complicates the most obvious narrative, that of an antiagrarian judiciary from 1923 to 1928. The Original Agrarian Jurisprudence To understand why the Supreme Court became the obstacle that it did (and when it did) it is necessary to begin with the early agrarian jurisprudence...