Where can I get Mexican Supreme Court rulings?

September 11, 2008 6:41 AM

Where can I find the full text of recent Mexican Supreme Court rulings? I can only find the announcements of their decisions, but not the decisions themselves...

I'm specifically interested in their most recent ruling, about secret ballots, which you can see on their front page here: http://www.scjn.gob.mx/PortalSCJN/

Muchas gracias!

posted by allen8219 to law & government (3 comments total)

At some point, you'll be able to find the full text of these rulings on LexisNexis. In fact, access to Jurisprudencia de la Corte Suprema de Mexico is one of the few advantages that LexisNexis offers over Westlaw, at least in the realm of foreign legal materials. However, their db is only current through December 2007, for reasons that should become clear below.

There's another useful database called vLex that may have these decisions as well, but I no longer have a subscription, so I can't see. If you need to access a free database, you should definitely search on GLIN, available through the Law Library of Congress.

If you live near Mexico, and if you speak Spanish, you may be able to find the Boletín Semanario Judicial de la Federación at an academic library that serving an affiliated Escuela de Derechos. WorldCat lists only the UNAM in Nayarit as holding this series, but I believe that this result is more a function of the fact that few Mexican academic libraries use the OCLC software than it is to any collection development approach with respect to Decisions of the Corte de Justicia. I haven't yet had a chance to search any Mexican OPACs or online Union Catalogs, so you may want to plug that title into one if you come across such a beast.

You're not going to find it on the website of the Corte, because you're looking for "Jurisprudencia," and their IUS database hasn't yet posted decisions from 2008. (Which is probably why Lexis doesn't have it, as they likely pull these decisions from the Corte's site and then charge you $$$ to search for it through them.) However, you may try browsing the Versión Estenográfica 2008 from the Corte, which appears to be a transcript of the arguments or discussion on the court. I didn't see that particular decision there, but I didn't look very carefully. You may have better luck there than I did.

Finally, please do not expect to find these decisions in English. If you need English translations, you'll probably have to hire a legal translator to do this for you. Believe it or not, there is absolutely no institutional reason for the Corte Suprema to translate their decisions into English, and so they're not likely to ever do so.
posted by deejay jaydee at 7:54 AM on September 11, 2008 [1 favorite]

You can search the full text of decisions here. Don't be fooled by the 2006 in the address or the 2007 on the logo; the database is fairly up to date, though it looks like they're only up to August 2008 at the moment.

Failing that, are you near a major law school or near a law school in a border state? If so, see if they subscribe to the Semanario Judicial de la Federación. The University of Texas law library has a subscription, I know.
posted by jedicus at 8:02 AM on September 11, 2008

Thanks a lot, both of you were very helpful. I'm going to see if any of my friends in law school can look it up for me...

I had found the Jurispredencia section, and I was just not sure if maybe there was another place where they post newer decisions... it's things like this that remind me how amazing it is that our e-government stuff in the US works as well as it does. And I am totally spoiled.

Thanks again!
posted by allen8219 at 8:20 AM on September 11, 2008