Political studies of the judicial decision in Latin America

Abstract

This paper discusses the political studies of the judicial decision as a field of empirical studies of law that, framed in socio-legal studies, has recently entered the Latin American legal academy.

These studies consider female judges as political actors and use theoretical and methodological tools from political sciences to analyze their behaviour. These studies attempt to analyze judicial decisions, not in a descriptive and/or normative way, but seek to explain why judges decide what they decide. 

In that way, explanatory models that understand the judicial decision as  a function of certain variables are critically discussed. These variables can be judges’ ideology, judges’ political preferences, the political context in which they operate, their legal ideology, the practices of the bureaucracies where they carry out their position or were trained as lawyer. Furthermore, the dominant theoretical frameworks in Latin America are analized, which especially studied the judges of the Supreme Court of Argentina 

Finally, this paper discusses the historical, theoretical and methodological reasons that initially hindered their entry into socio-legal studies. It concludes by bringing attention to crucial issues that need to be addressed to consolidate the status of the political studies of the judicial decision into the Latin American legal academy.