In September 2024, then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador pushed through a major constitutional reform deliberately intended to make Mexico’s judiciary more responsive to popular opinion and political influences. Specifically, the recent reform introduces the direct election of all Mexican justices, magistrates, and judges at the federal and state level, reduces the number of Supreme Court justices from 11 to 9, reduces justices’ tenure from 15 to 12 years, establishes a new Judicial Disciplinary Tribunal, and creates an administrative agency to manage the judiciary's resources.  

The electoral selection of judges is planned to occur in two phases, with two waves of elections slated for June 2025 and June 2027. To ensure that judges are well qualified, candidates will first pass through a filtering process by which they apply for consideration prior to being placed on the ballot. The nomination process for the first 881 judicial positions currently up for grabs began on October 16, 2024 and concluded on February 12, 2025, with thousands of potential candidates vying for a slot on the June 2025 ballot to take office in September. Once in office, the reform’s newly created Judicial Discipline Tribunal (Tribunal de Disciplina Judicial) will have the power to supervise, review, and sanction their work and decisions, which WOLA claims will place further pressure on judges to adhere to whatever political influences are dominant at the national level. 

López Obrador asserted that this bold experiment in popular selection of the judiciary at all levels—something not found anywhere else in the world—would help to "democratize" the Mexican judiciary by allowing citizens to have direct input in selecting the arbiters of justice. However, critics argue that this reform will seriously undermine the independence of the judiciary, encourage corruption, and erode checks and balances in Mexico’s seemingly resurgent single-party political system.  

The reforms were introduced in the final month of López Obrador’s lame duck presidency, just as his hand-picked successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, was about to take office. Sheinbaum had been elected as Mexico’s first female president in June 2024, with a MORENA party super-majority capable of making changes to the country’s 107-year-old constitution. López Obrador was determined to push through this reform as one of the final acts of his six-year presidential term (2018-2024. It was a move that he hoped would clear the way for the Sheinbaum administration (2024-2030) to continue with his leftist policy agenda, which he believed had been hobbled by the country’s courts.  

While López Obrador’s party had an ample legislative majority during his term, Mexico’s Supreme Court had pushed back against his efforts to militarize public security, weaken the country’s autonomous electoral authority, and strike down an energy sector law that favored the country’s public utility over private investors. Lower federal courts had also issued injunctions that delayed the construction of his pet project, a trans-peninsular train (the “Tren Maya”) to the Yucatán. Indeed, in April 2022 the Supreme Court even blocked López Obrador’s first attempt to reform the judiciary, which included popular election of judges as part of a broader constitutional reform that became known “Plan A.” Months later, the Supreme Court again ruled against López Obrador’s next attempt, or “Plan B,” which included a series of legal reforms approved by his party’s congressional majority in December 2022.  

Many saw these rulings as illustration of how an independent judiciary can and should serve as a check on executive power, as intended by constitutional reforms empowering Mexico’s judiciary since the 1990s. However, López Obrador charged that Mexico’s courts were controlled by an elite minority bent on hindering his efforts to transform the country. After his previous efforts were thwarted, López Obrador seized the opportunity of his (or Sheinbaum’s) newfound qualified majority to push through the “Plan C” reforms passed in September 2024.¹ López Obrador’s effort to squeeze in major constitutional reforms into the final weeks of his term was an unusually audacious move for a lame duck president, and resulted in major protests and a nationwide strike by judicial sector personnel.² Mexican civil society organizations also responded with alarm over the president’s over-reach and its possible implications for Mexican democracy. Even normally reserved U.S. and Canadian diplomats issued public criticisms of the reform, causing López Obrador to declare an informal “pause” on diplomatic relations with both countries due to their alleged interference in Mexican domestic affairs.  

Yet, there is no doubt that the reforms raise serious concerns about the way that judicial elections will impact the political landscape in Mexico. In addition to political parties, other interest groups (including business interests and organized crime groups) will be more likely to attempt to influence the judicial election process, the functioning of the judiciary, and the rule of law. The fact that these reforms were passed in 2024—an election year in which at least 60 politicians were assassinated while campaigning for public office—also raised serious questions about how judges will fair, who will be financing their campaigns, and what will happen to those who truly seek to uphold the law.  

As a practical matter, the sheer number of positions that are up for election will present some significant challenges. First, the vetting and nomination process introduced by the reform will create a new, purportedly non-partisan process for candidate selection, unlike anything that exists for Mexico’s executive and legislative branches. That is, unlike any other elections in Mexico, parties will not nominate candidates and judges cannot openly profess a partisan affiliation. Instead, potential judicial candidates will be evaluated by an Evaluation Committee comprising representatives from the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. However, since each branch will have the option to nominate up to a certain number of candidates, this could result in dozens of candidates for each judicial position and will make it difficult for voters to make well informed choices. For example, there could be up to ten candidates for each of the nine positions on the Supreme Court (a total of 270), perhaps dozens vying for two vacant seats on the Superior Chamber of the Electoral Tribunal, and dozens more for the regional electoral tribunals. Half of all circuit level magistrate seats (464) and district judgeships (386) will be up for grabs: a total of 881 federal circuit and state judges to be selected. Since each position has 5-10 candidates, the total number of judges in any given year could very likely range around 6,000-7,000 would be-nominees (pre-candidates).  

In the absence of party labels or “cues” and in the face of such a large number of candidates, voters will have to carefully research candidates’ educational backgrounds, career histories, and public statements to determine who is fit to serve. More likely, though, many voters —and even member of the Evaluation Committee—are likely to make their decision based on very limited informational cues (like gender, name recognition, or physical appearance), or simply stay home from the polls. In this sense, López Obrador’s gran experiment with judicial democracy may lead to poorly-informed choices or simply greater abstentionism in judicial elections.  

A second immediate consequence of the reform is that it will almost certainly result in a great deal of disruption in the judiciary as new judges are introduced to the system during the coming two years. Indeed, the fact that many judges have either already resigned in frustration or are now frantically campaigning to retain their seats under great uncertainty means that there will be a large amount of turnover in the Mexican judiciary over the next two years. This could lead to some very unfortunate outcomes, including the possible disruption of thousands of ongoing criminal cases, since proceedings will need to be restarted if the presiding judge loses his or her election.   

As a related final practical consideration, Mexican think tank México Evalúa recently underscored that the reform has imposed new, unfunded mandates on local legislatures and judiciaries, which are currently scrambling to update their constitutions and operating procedures to put the reforms into effect.  

At a minimum, there will be an enormous need to help new Mexican judges—including many with far too little experience—to develop their court administration and trial management skills. Until recently, the United States had been providing aid to professionalize Mexican judicial system, including much needed trial preparation and litigation skills in law schools and prosecutorial offices. However, the 2024 judicial reforms will no doubt create a new area of need: judicial trainings and exchanges to assist Mexico’s nationwide cohort of novice judges. Given the state of U.S. foreign assistance, it is unlikely that the kind of programs once sponsored by USAID and the U.S. State Department will be available to help support this kind of essential training.  

In brief, López Obrador’s 2024 judicial reform marks a significant shift in Mexico’s judicial system, and will be part of his much-debated legacy as a transformational president. While the reform aims to make the judiciary more responsive to popular input, it may instead undermine judicial independence, impair the functioning of the courts, and erode the fragile foundations of Mexican democracy.  

Regardless of the outcome, it is clear that the reform's impact will be far-reaching, will introduce significant disruptions to the judicial system, and creates an enormous need to prepare the incoming cohort of newly elected judges for what lies ahead. The United States and the international community—including organizations that have provided aid to professionalize Mexico's judicial system—should pay close attention to these developments and consider how to assist Mexico in maintaining an independent and effective judiciary.