Constitutional Lawyers and the Inter-American Court's Varied Authority

“The power of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) to shape government behavior varies greatly from country to country. All states subject to the Court’s jurisdiction accept its authority to adjudicate disputes, and all take at least some meaningful steps toward judgment compliance. […] But in some states the Court’s judgments play a far greater role: they are untethered from the particular dispute that gives rise to them and take on a life as law-like rules that guide the subsequent behavior of public actors and the outcomes of disputes that never reach the Court. In some states the Court’s judgments even come to shape policymaking and public debates, constraining the range of options that are put on the table […] This article demonstrates that variation of the Inter-American Court’s authority across states can be explained in great part by the practice of constitutional law in each state. This is not to say that differences in constitutional texts explain the variation. Rather, the article suggests that for the Court’s authority to expand beyond mere judgment compliance, two factors other than the black-letter law must be in place. The first factor is the presence of lawyers—be they scholars, judges, public-interest lawyers, or other practitioners—who adhere to and promote a particular vision of constitutional law as containing within it international human rights law. […] The second factor explaining this variation is that those who advance these ideas must have political impact at the national level: they must be able to forge alliances with legislative and executive reformers who adopt the movement’s vision of law and advance it as part of their own project of political reform.”