Latin American Courts Going Public: A Comparative Assessment

In the last two decades, Latin American high courts engaged in institutional innovations promoting social participation in their judicial decision-making through mechanisms as public hearings, amicus curiae, or the use of social media. This article first theorizes this engagement with the public. Building on insights about judicial legitimacy as well as strategic and ideational accounts it discusses possible motivations of courts to open to the public and the effects of this behavior. Second, it provides a conceptualization of such court engagement and a typology of this engagement according to different levels of intensity. Third, with a comparative assessment of sixteen high courts from all democratic Latin American countries, it shows that this court behavior is observable for all countries, excepting Uruguay, but differs regarding the intensity of opening.