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3: Liberal Jurisprudence and Article 123
- University of New Mexico Press
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51 Chapter Three Liberal Jurisprudence and Article 123 › [A]rticle 123 has been scandalously violated; in effect it is not in force, we all know it; it is the Supreme Court of Justice, to a significant degree, who is at fault since they have made the labor boards completely useless. —Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama, 1921 As a matter of public law, the Revolution came to an end on May 1, 1917. The new president, former first chief of the Revolution Venustiano Carranza, was sworn into office on this date (national elections had taken place in March) and the new constitution, promulgated in February, went into effect. This is where those histories that have focused on the constitutionalization of Revolutionary social reform also end. However, as revisionist historians of the Mexican Revolution have frequently noted, raising these Revolutionary norms to the level of constitutional law was one thing, putting them into practice was another matter altogether. The obstacle to implementation most frequently cited by historians was the need to pass regulatory legislation before these new constitutional norms could be put into effect. With respect to the new labor provisions this had to take place at the local or state level (per article 123) and this was done quickly in some states and not at all in others. However, those states with strong labor backing, which were able to move quickly, regulating and implementing some of the more radical principles of article 123, soon ran into an obstacle of another kind, namely, the resistance of the courts and of the Supreme Court in particular. How should this resistance be characterized? 52 Chapter Three Two very different interpretations immediately suggest themselves on the basis of the extant scholarship. The first, based on work written predominantly by political and social historians of the Revolution, tends to deny agency to the Supreme Court altogether, explaining these jurisprudential shifts in terms of changes in executive policy and assuming judicial subservience to the will of the executive. Thus an executive branch hostile to Revolutionary social reform best explains Supreme Court resistance to the implementation of radical state labor laws. A second interpretation, based on the work of legal scholars (trained in Mexican law) and generally ignored by historians of the Revolution, argues the opposite, that the Court’s interpretation of state-level labor laws indicates instead the relative autonomy of the Supreme Court from executive interference. It makes sense to take this latter interpretation more seriously than historians have generally done. However, in the case of labor the datum of Supreme Court opposition is not as obvious an index of judicial autonomy as some scholars have assumed. To be fair, the legal scholarship does not focus on the Revolutionary period exclusively. It has generally taken a much longer (and more general) view of these processes of institutional change, beginning in the 1860s when Mexico’s Supreme Court began to make use of its powers of amparo. For example , Héctor Fix-Zamudio lists “differences of opinion between the federal executive and the Supreme Court from 1918–1929” related to Revolutionary social reform as just one of several important conflicts that might lead us to qualify the assumption of an uninterrupted judicial subservience to the executive . He also notes the conflict that occurred in the early years of the Restored Republic over article 8 of the organic law of 1869, barring amparo from overturning local judicial decisions, as well as the conflict that arose over the doctrine of “incompetent by origin” (see chapter 1) that pitted the Court against Lerdo’s administration and helped bring Porfirio Díaz to power in 1876.1 The first Supreme Court to function under Díaz’s tenure as president reversed this controversial jurisprudence, a move that, along with the removal of the chief justice from the presidential succession in 1882 (via a constitutional amendment), effectively depoliticized the Supreme Court. If this was a precondition for amparo’s subsequent consolidation, as already suggested , it also facilitated the efforts of Porfirio Díaz to ensure a more compliant and less politically active judicial power in the years after Díaz’s second reelection. The key to this control of the judicial power was Díaz’s control of the electoral process itself and the constitutional requirement that justices be [35.175.174.36] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:39 GMT) 53 Liberal Jurisprudence and Article 123 reelected every six years. In 1893 Díaz also defeated the attempt by the...