Supreme Court and Public Participation: Reflections from a Public Hearing in the Argentine Court

In the last decade, many Supreme Courts in Latin America have adopted public hearings as a part of their decision-making process. This novel phenomenon in these tribunals’ cons­titutional law practice has been seen as a unique opportunity to tight the links between the judiciary and the citizenry. Matter-of-factly, the highest courts’ decision to open up decision-making to public participation has been stressed by a constitutional theory that advances democracy in judicial adjudication. This work inquires on public participation in the context of Argentine Supreme Court by pointing out the tensions, discourses, and different perspectives on the cases that the coming of new actors to the judicial arena— other than those who usually stand before the Court—instantiate. To do so, we focus on a particular public hearing held by the Argentine Court in November 2016, in a landmark case decided by the so-called new Court, established in the aftermath of the 2001 crisis. From the ethnographic data collected from interviews, field observation, analysis of the case file, and secondary sources, we propose a situated reflection on the issues at stake in public hearings, in this hearing in particular, through the lens of the democratic cons­titutional theory.