Legal Miscellaneous VI

La sala de máquinas de la Constitución.

Roberto Gargarella

Has it happened to you that you know you should read a book and cannot find it? It happened to me with this compendious volume of Gargarella. Years of wanting to achieve without luck, either online or in bookstores, which may be due to a great interest of readers combined with a low print run. Or simple bad luck.

In a volume of almost four hundred pages, the Argentine jurist makes an interesting walk through two centuries of constitutionalism in Latin America (in fact such is the subtitle of the book, although it reaches the beginning of the present century) from a classification in three matrices: liberal (in the Europe meaning), conservative (right) and radical (left). This is done by reviewing the normative texts, but above all the ideas of the main jurists of the subcontinent.

It does not remain in comparative history, which in itself would already be very meritorious when presenting the points of union between different individual works carried out in various countries; it also seeks to show, as a kind of warning for future constitutional makers, the risks or limitations of combining these three matrices, and above all, the need to turn to see the structure and mechanism of power operation, inviting not only to remain in the very important, but necessarily partial, bill of rights section.

It is a good book, in which Gargarella does not hesitate to opt for a model that combines collective self-government and individual autonomy, shows its commitment to a social vision but at the same time does not keep critics of social constitutionalism-