Conceptualizing and Measuring Legal Cultures: Evidence from a Survey of Mexican Judges

Evidencia a partir de una encuesta a Jueces Federales Mexicanos

Abstract

We propose a new conceptualization of an elusive but important concept, “legal culture”. We define it as a set of of attitudes, practices and expectations about how the legal corpus should be interpreted, and a bundle of expectations regarding appropriate behavior in the judicial field. Legal culture thus conceived has three relevant dimensions: judges’ interpretive routines; judges’ vision of their role in the political system; and views of their role in the judiciary. In order to show the usefulness of our conceptual approach, we present results from an original survey of Mexican federal judges that measures different aspects of legal culture and their consequences on judicial behavior in hypothetical cases. The survey gauges attitudes towards the adjudication process; in particular, we explore how judges characterize their formal prerogatives, and routine aspects of their job. The instrument also looks at how judges perceive their obligations in the political system, as well as the extent to which they envision the possibility of issuing innovative jurisprudence or tend to abide by the hierarchical norms of the judiciary. Our results indicate the presence of consolidated pockets of formalism and neo-constitutionalism in Mexican federal courts. Preliminary results show that the effect of some legal cultural attributes on the pro-rights behavior characteristic of neo-constitutional judges is substantively important and distinct from ideology.