The Legal Culture of the Judicial Elites in Mexico

This chapter addresses the central task of describing the types of legal culture that currently prevail in the Mexican federal judiciary. The findings demonstrate that there is not a single type of legal culture among judges, nor is it predominantly formalist-positivist. In Mexico, there are judges who hold a constitutionalist-argumentative legal culture, willing to make interpretations to create policies from the bench. However, we can also confirm the presence of a positivist legal culture among them in which deference to enacted law persist. Considering these arguments, judges’ opinions regarding rights and freedoms such as abortion, drugs, and same-sex marriage are also analyzed.