How many constitutional reforms produce rule of law?

Abstract

The Mexican Constitution is one of the oldest constitutions compared to the average lifetime of constitutions across the world, but it also represents one of the texts with a larger degree of amendments compared to the original text. The existence of a large number of reforms can refer to high levels of flexibility, something that involves the capacity to integrate new rights and institutions to respond to political transformations and the demands of an increasingly plural society but, despite its longevity and undoubted capacity for transformation, the Constitution has been unable to constitute itself as the effective foundation for the development of a democratic rule of law in Mexico. This article focuses on two basic questions: why is the rule of law so weak in Mexico? And to what extent do the problems of design, coherence and constitutional change affect performance of the rule of law? In the Mexican case, the logic that understands the Constitution as a political instrument and the hyper-reformism that emerges from it, affecting the coherence, meaning, and effectiveness of the text, has made it impossible to transform the Constitution into exactly the coordination mechanism on which the development and quality of the rule of law partly depends.