Juan González Bertomeu y Ramiro Álvarez Ugarte, The I·CONnect-Clough Center 2018 Global Review of Constitutional Law: Argentina Report. R Albert et al (eds), Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy. 2019
doi:10.2139/ssrn.3471638
In our 2017 report, we described a Supreme Court in flux. Early in 2016, two new justices joined a five-member Court against the background of broader political change. We therein hinted at possible jurisprudential shifts, involving a redefinition of both the Court’s role in general and its standards on human rights law in particular. In 2017, an ostensibly minor decision but with heavy implications regarding the policies of memory, truth, and justice concerning human rights violations during the last dictatorship had invited strong popular backlash. In 2018, and after a legislative intervention, the Supreme Court revisited its decision, this time amidst turmoil within the Court itself. After an eleven-year tenure, Justice Lorenzetti was replaced in September as Court President by Justice Rosenkrantz, the member perceived to be most closely aligned with the national Executive. The move seems to have left strangled relationships within the Court and was followed by another power reconfiguration, what may partly account for the relative paucity of significant cases decided during the year. The most important development in constitutional politics, concerning the legalization of abortion, took place outside the courts.