Professional Affiliation

Professor, ITAM (Mexico City)

Expert Bio

Julio Ríos Figueroa is Professor at the Department of Law at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM). He is the author of Constitutional Courts as Mediators. Armed Conflict, Civil-Military Relations and the Rule of Law in Latin America (2016, Cambridge University Press). Professor Ríos Figueroa is a former fellow at the Wilson Center (2022-2023). His works can be found here: https://rios-figueroa.com/

Expertise

• Democracy
• Governance

Wilson Center Project

Authoritarian Legacies and the Winding Road to the Rule of Law in Mexico

Project Summary

The project examines the persistence in democracy of patrimonial logics inherited from the authoritarian past, specifically the pitfalls of bureaucratic reform in eradicating particularism in core state institutions. The empirical focus of the project is the institutional development of the Mexican Federal Judiciary over more than one hundred years. The project exploits the establishment of a merit-based system of judicial selection in Mexico in 1994, an ambitious reform that sought to professionalize an opaque federal justice system that had historically evolved to provide legal coverage and regulation to durable dominant-party authoritarianism. The project documents the shortcomings and unfulfilled expectations of this reform tracing their roots to the consolidation of the patronage system of judicial selection that operated during the period of hegemonic party rule established in the 1930s.

Major Publications

• Constitutional Courts as Mediators. Armed Conflict, Civil-Military Relations, and the Rule of Law in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2016)
• Courts in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2010. Co-edited with Gretchen Helmke))
• Anatomy of an Informal Institution. The "Gentlemen's Pact" and Judicial Selection in Mexico, 1917-1994. (IPSR, vol. 39, no. 5. With Andrea Pozas-Loyo)