Author Interview: The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Law in Latin America
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Conrado Hübner Mendes, Roberto Gargarella and Sebastián Guidi
University of Buenos Aires & Sebastián Guidi
Roberto Gargarella and Sebastián Guidi, two of the editors of The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Law in Latin America (Oxford University Press, 2022) told us about this recently published edited collection
What inspired you to take up this project?
Before our book, comparative constitutional law in Latin America lacked a comprehensive handbook covering the main countries in the region, the most important topics in constitutional law, and a necessary “outsider’s perspective” from scholars working in other regions. Of course, previous books paved the way (for example, Rosalind Dixon and Tom Ginsburg’s Comparative Constitutional Law in Latin America, or Juan González Bertomeu and Roberto Gargarella’s The Latin American Casebook), but no book to date had attempted a systematic and comprehensive review of Latin American Constitutional Law.
Also, through the years we have built an amazing network of scholars working on Latin American constitutional law issues and engaging them in a project like this, in dialogue with each other, seemed a sensible idea.
Whose work was influential on you throughout the course of the project?
Many collective books or handbooks in the last years have guided our approach. Perhaps the most important was Michel Rosenfeld and András Sajó’s Oxford Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Law, which tackled many of the issues that we also deal with, but, necessarily, at a greater level of abstraction. Dixon and Ginsburg’s Comparative Constitutional Law in Latin America falls into the opposite direction: some of its articles focus on specific details, rather than providing a comprehensive account. Here, we tried to fall in the middle: having some theoretically sophisticated accounts of mechanisms and principles in place in Latin American constitutional law, but as a handbook of comparative law. We hope to have achieved that.
What challenges did you face in writing the book?
All of the authors in the book undertook their task responsibly and professionally, and we are very thankful for that. All the articles were great in quality and we were able to provide feedback on each one. But still, putting 60 authors together in a book like this was as challenging as can be imagined. For all academics might claim to like precision, we still have a void when it comes to communicating the strictness of deadlines. Also, planning a table of contents that you are not going to write is vertiginous: you plan the titles assuming they will be filled with some content, but you cannot really be sure the author will share your views.
What do you hope to see as the book’s contribution to academic discourse and to constitutional or public law more broadly?
A first and obvious goal is that, we hope, the Handbook can work as a tool for academics and students to have a first approach to the region’s constitutional law. We don’t expect the Handbook to break new ground by itself. Second, and this is important, we do hope that it can help young (and not so young) comparative scholars to learn from their more experienced peers and facilitate their research, which might indeed be ground-breaking. I wonder what the authors of the Handbook would have written had they had a handbook like this as they were doing their first works in comparative law.
What’s next?
Each of us has their own projects of course, and not all in comparative law. Roberto is pursuing a line of research that tries to bring people back into the Constitution. Many scholars writing about the current phenomenon of democratic erosion blame it on the weakening of “Republican” checks and balances, as if populism and demagogy was a symptom of “too much democracy”, the way Madison would have thought about it. Roberto thinks it’s not too much, but too little, and it’s crucial to make people participate in democratic life through innovative tools such as citizen assemblies or broad public debates. Sebastián is working on a project comparing autonomous agencies in Latin America. Autonomous agencies (central banks, public service regulators, electoral agencies, etc.) exert such an important portion of public power that it is indeed strange that constitutional scholars haven’t paid more attention on them.
Roberto Gargarella is Professor of Law at the University of Buenos Aires and at Torcuato di Tella University in Buenos Aires
Sebastián Guidi is a JSD candidate at Yale Law School and Adjunct Professor in Universidad Torcuato di Tella
Suggested Citation: Roberto Gargarella and Sebastián Guidi, ‘Author Interview: The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Law in Latin America’ IACL-AIDC Blog (14 April 2022) https://blog-iacl-aidc.org/just-published/2022/4/15/author-interview-the-oxford-handbook-of-comparative-constitutional-law-in-latin-america.