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

Conclusion

101 Conclusion › When historians have sought to assess the important legal changes brought about by the Mexican Revolution they have generally looked to the various Revolutionary plans, to the debates of the Constituent Congress of 1916–1917, and of course, to a comparison of the two constitutional texts, 1857 with that of 1917. Occasionally such accounts have stretched all the way back to include colonial antecedents, but even these have remained bound to an exclusive preoccupation with legislative change. Because these historians have generally ignored the importance of judicial sources, few have even mentioned the fact that one of the obstacles to the implementation of the Constitution’s new socioeconomic rights was an amparo-granting Supreme Court that decided hundreds of cases favoring the liberal individual rights of employers and landowners against state and federal governments. This study began, then, by challenging the tendency in the literature to ignore jurisprudential sources. As we have seen, attention to these sources provides a very different account of the course of Mexican constitutional history. Constitutional change during the Porfiriato, although it mirrored in some respects the political centralization of power that the Porfirian regime is so well known for, did not always serve the narrow class interests of the Porfirian oligarchy, and a robust conception of the institutional scope of amparo existed in the years prior to 1910, a conception that nonetheless excluded political rights to effective suffrage. These changes, and the consolidation of the amparo suit more generally, are important for understanding how the Supreme Court became the obstacle that it did in the years after 1917. 102 Conclusion Articles 27 and 123 of the Constitution of 1917 were indeed radical and revolutionary provisions at the time, as even revisionist historians of the Revolution have recognized. But the relevant context for understanding their interpretation in 1917 is the history of what came before, not what came later. What the future would hold could not possibly have been known to the delegates to the Querétaro Constituent Congress or the justices of the first Revolutionary Court. Although many other countries in Europe and Latin America would also seek to address the “social question” in their new constitutions during the interwar period, Mexico’s Constitution of 1917 was the first. Historians of the Revolution have often wondered aloud if the social provisions contained in constitutional articles 27 and 123 really had more than a merely programmatic or symbolic value prior to the six-year term of Lázaro Cárdenas. However, they have rarely mentioned the role of an amparo-granting Supreme Court or the ways in which even the original formulation of articles 27 and 123 was also conditioned by forty years of constitutional jurisprudence. I have argued that many of the deputies to the Constituent Congress were familiar with this tradition of jurisprudence and that the socioeconomic reforms embodied in articles 27 and 123 were initially conceived as additional social limits to liberal individual rights. The Constituent Congress also bolstered the independence of the judicial power through new institutional guarantees designed to guard against executive interference. Changes made to the amparo suit largely confirmed the judge-made changes I have described for the nineteenth century and answered some of the criticisms of the 1908 constitutional amendment to article 102 of the Constitution of 1857 (article 107 of the Constitution of 1917). Secondary legislation that would properly regulate amparo in light of these changes would not come until 1919, but this did not prevent the first Revolutionary Court from admitting and deciding amparos on the basis of past precedent and the older regulatory law as modified by the new constitution . The continuity of amparo and of amparo law, however, allowed those who opposed the Revolutionary principles contained in articles 27 and 123 to successfully file suit in federal courts. I have also argued that the justices of the Supreme Court, although they decided hundreds of these cases against both labor and agrarian reforms between 1917 and 1934, were not motivated by a hostility toward the new socioeconomic principles themselves. Indeed, a commitment to the legality and correctness of administrative decisions, combined with a 103 Conclusion conception of their judicial role as impartial arbiters of a legal conflict, put the justices of the third Revolutionary Court at loggerheads with the executive branch over the implementation of the agrarian reform. In the case of labor reform, too, I have argued that the justices...