The Mexican Constitution of 1917 was the first in the world to include social rights, with article 27 providing land for landless population centres and article 123 creating protections for workers and their families. In the received history of these famous social rights, federal judges and Supreme Court justices are depicted as being ideologically opposed to the Constitution's redistributive and protective social principles and thus inclined to obstruct systematically their implementation. Timothy M. James uses largely unexplored jurisprudential sources (the resolutions of federal tribunals and the writings and commentaries of jurists and other legal professionals, found mainly but not exclusively in the Supreme Court's historical archive) to challenge this long-held view. In doing so, he builds on the work of Mexican legal scholars such as Ignacio Burgoa, Lucio Cabrera, and Antonio Carrillo, who have shown that jurisprudence very often favoured revolutionary social reform. And yet, the Supreme Court did end up granting protection to hundreds of employers and landowners against workers and villagers between 1917 and 1934. Therefore, the aim of this book is to explain how, why, and when the Supreme Court became an obstacle to the implementation of labour legislation and land reform. This point might seem a subtle one, but it is central to understanding the Mexican political system, especially the balance of power between different branches of government, during a formative period in the history of the post-revolutionary state.

Chapter 1 provides a revisionist history of the Supreme Court prior to 1910. Because the Court could not interfere in electoral matters and did not represent a direct threat to the executive controlled regime, it did have relative autonomy with regard to amparo suits, an individual's right to annul arbitrary or illegitimate acts committed by state authorities. Unlike most studies of the Porfirio Díaz regime (1876–1911), James takes seriously the Supreme Court's actions in this area and reaches a number of original conclusions. First, amparos did in fact sometimes prove to be a check on the discretional use of state power. Second, in line with the work of Robert Knowlton and Justus Fenner, James shows that the amparo suit was often used (sometimes successfully) by the non-elite as well as the elite. And third, the Supreme Court was quite efficient, resolving some 57,000 amparo suits between 1887 and 1907.

This history of a relatively strong and active Supreme Court is important because in chapter 2 the author argues that 40 years of constitutional jurisprudence conditioned the understanding of revolutionary social reform and the relationship between the new social rights and the rest of the Constitution. If historians and social scientists have portrayed debates about articles 27 and 123 at the 1916–1917 Constitutional Convention as a struggle between conservative and progressive delegates, James shows that delegates across the political spectrum accepted the amparo as a key device to preserve the balance of power among the three branches of government. There was consensus for a strong judiciary and, following nineteenth-century precedent, the social reforms embodied in articles 27 and 123 were conceived as social limits to liberal rights. The paradox was that, in constitutional arrangements that preserved an earlier tradition of judicial oversight and guarantees of individual rights, the amparo became a powerful tool used by employers and landowners to resist new labour and land reform laws.

Chapter 3 explores the Supreme Court's implementation of article 123 and the newly created conciliation and arbitration boards designed to mediate worker-employer conflicts in a way that avoided court formalities and delays. Court justices recognised the social justification for these boards, but they argued that, given that article 16 of the Constitution upheld the division of powers among the executive, judicial and legislative branches of government, the boards should be administrative (executive branch) agencies, not tribunals pronouncing sentences. Employers benefited from the constitutional limits established by the Court to protect the individual rights of citizens, and they managed to deploy the amparo against the implementation of state labour laws regulating the boards. In response, the emergent organised labour movement brought considerable political pressure to bear on the Court, forcing it to expand the federal government's administrative discretion and thus allow the boards to render binding decisions. Moreover, by the time that a federal labour law was enacted in 1931, a constitutional amendment had reduced the overall scope of the amparo.

If in labour matters the early Supreme Court insisted on respecting the division of powers upheld by article 16, chapter 4 shows that this was not the case with regard to the executive-led land reform, where the National Agrarian Commission acted as a tribunal and the president pronounced binding sentences (a violation of article 16 that this book might have explored further). In fact, until at least 1922 the Supreme Court actively supported the executive branch in its efforts to implement land reform. And yet, as James shows, the Court did retain the power of judicial oversight, through which it protected the right of landowners to use amparos to denounce illegal proceedings at a time when the national government was systematically violating agrarian legislation during the implementation of land reform. As in the case of labour, James shows that ‘the Court was not subjectively committed to a defence of the current property regime’, even though ‘its constitutional jurisprudence meant that ultimately its judicial decisions favoured those who were’ (p. 100).

With the resurgence of research on the legal history of Latin America, particularly a growing interest in the role of the judiciary (in part prompted by current reforms in many countries' court systems), books such as the one reviewed here are engaging in a long-needed dialogue between social scientists and historians, on the one hand, and well-established traditions of legal scholarship, on the other. This dialogue allows scholars like James to explore important social rights without having to disregard matters such as due process, the rule of law, the balance of power among the three branches of government, and, for Mexico, the question of limiting or expanding the scope of the amparo suit guaranteeing individual rights.