Juliana Jaramillo reviews Jordi Díez’s The Judicial Politics of Abortion in Latin America: Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Mexico (The University of North Carolina Press, 2025).
The decriminalization of abortion is one of those legal reforms in which feminist movements, despite sustained efforts and resources, have yet to secure consistent global gains. Hard-won advances remain precarious. The reversals in Poland’s case of K1/20 and United States’ Dobbs v. Jackson reveal this fragility. In his book The Judicial Politics of Abortion in Latin America: Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Mexico, Jordi Díez addresses this dynamic of progress, stagnation, and regression in abortion politics, focusing on Latin America. This region, at the turn of the century, had some of the most restrictive abortion regimes in the democratic world.
Díez’s book traces how this restrictive landscape, where abortion on request was unavailable across the region at the end of the twentieth century, began to shift over the following decades. He highlights how the region’s highest courts played a central role in this transformation through landmark rulings on abortion regulation. Taken together, these decisions formed what the author calls the first wave of abortion decriminalization, spanning from 2000 to 2012.
Crucially, Díez shows how the region’s highest courts played a central role in abortion politics through landmark rulings
The Judicial Politics of Abortion in Latin America adopts a comparative perspective to demonstrate this point. It analyzes four landmark rulings that capture the mixed outcomes of abortion politics in the region: decisions by the high courts of Colombia (2006), Mexico (2008), and Argentina (2012), which ruled in favor of greater liberalization, and the decision by Costa Rica’s court (2007), which instead upheld the status quo by dismissing a legal challenge to abortion restrictions. Together, these cases answer to the central question on what accounts for this variation, both in the direction of rulings (pro- or anti- abortion) and in their amplitude (high in Argentina, moderate in Colombia and Mexico, and null in Costa Rica).
This variation, according to Jordi Díez, reflects an interplay between agency and structure. Its emergence rests on two factors. First, the presence of strategic actors, such as justices and law clerks, who are capable of assembling majorities to reduce abortion restrictions through the deployment of a persuasive strategy. Second, the broader political climate also matters in this context. In particular, the positions of state and non-state actors outside the court (such as presidents and members of Congress), as well as the larger societal debates, influence the judicial decision-making process. According to Díez,
“variance is fundamentally the result of strategic agency exercised within junctural contexts” (p. 8)
Six chapters structure the argument of this book. The first opens with a discussion of the literature on judicial politics and judicial behavior, followed by a presentation of the author’s theoretical framework. Díez examines the three models typically used to explain judicial behavior: the legal, attitudinal, and strategic models. He argues that the latter model, which conceptualizes judges as actors who pursue their preferences while making strategic compromises, is the best suited to explain variation across cases. Then, the author turns to a detailed historical analysis of each country’s sociopolitical trajectory, focusing on the events and debates that have shaped the institutional design of their high courts. This historical sensitivity, already visible in Díez’s early works, such as The Politics of Gay Marriage in Latin America, is of great value for understanding how courts in these countries evolved from relatively marginal institutions to central actors in defining rights and public policy.
Drawing on feminist theory, the second chapter examines the evolution of abortion regulation in Latin America, to reflect on its implications for democratic citizenship. After discussing the theoretical underpinnings and historical developments, the following four chapters present the findings for each country. The book concludes with a synthesis of the argument, a comparative look at abortion politics across the Americas, and a reflection on the study’s implications for the field of judicial politics and the protection of abortion rights.
Jordi Díez’s argument makes an important theoretical contribution to the study of judicial behavior. He thoroughly engages with existing models, which only partly explain how judges make decisions by emphasizing factors such as ideology, legal preferences, and relational positioning vis-à-vis political actors and public opinion. While these factors are relevant, they tend to overlook a crucial dimension: the internal strategic bargaining that unfolds within courts. Through vivid reconstructions of the judicial decision-making process across four cases, Díez demonstrates that key judicial actors engaged in bargaining, coalition building, and persuasion, and that these dynamics proved decisive in shaping outcomes. In the three pro-abortion rulings, these internal processes were instrumental in convincing reluctant or ideologically opposed justices to ultimately cast their votes in favor of liberalization. Without these strategic actors and efforts, the outcomes could have been very different, to the detriment of women’s rights. This was indeed the case in the Costa Rican ruling, where Díez shows that no justices were willing to make a strategic effort in favor of abortion.
“[I]n cases where high courts ruled in favor of decriminalizing abortion (Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico), a group of justices and law clerks took the initiative to convince the largest possible number of justices on each bench to vote in favor of decriminalizing access to abortion” (p. 8)
One particularly compelling and central aspect of Díez’s argument is that strategic bargaining involves not only the justices themselves but also their law clerks. While often overlooked in academic scholarship, law clerks have long been recognized by lawyers and practitioners as key actors in judicial decision-making. As Díez notes, they are often the ones responsible for drafting opinions. Although their influence varies across courts (appearing to be less significant in the Costa Rican court), they are important to understanding decision-making. This reinforces the argument that existing models of judicial behavior could benefit from paying closer attention to the work of law clerks.
The book’s methodological approach is another notable strength. Díez undertook the ambitious task of comparing the judicial decision-making process on abortion across four countries, drawing primarily on interviews with justices and law clerks involved. This privileged access to these sources enabled him to reconstruct, step by step, how deliberations unfolded from the moment the case selection to the handing down of the rulings. The result is a detailed account enriched by extensive empirical evidence, which combined with Díez’s engaging narrative style, adds enormous value to the book.
At the same time, this approach brings its own difficulties. Elite actors such as justices and law clerks are generally difficult to access, especially when the aim is to uncover internal and often confidential negotiations. As such, while the book’s invitation to look inside the internal dynamics of courts promises to be extremely valuable, the approach is not easy to replicate in practice. This is less a flaw of the study than a challenge built into its theoretical and methodological ambitions. That said, a clearer reflection on the positionality of the researcher would have strengthened the methodological discussion.
A second point that merits clarification concerns the classification of rulings according to their amplitude. Díez defines amplitude as “the extent to which access to abortion was relaxed” (p. 9), but the criteria remain ambiguous. It is not entirely clear whether this refers to the substantive outcome of the decision or to the types of arguments employed in the ruling. The contrast between Mexico and Argentina illustrates this issue. Mexico’s Court upheld the decriminalization of abortion up to the first trimester without restrictions, yet is labelled moderate. In turn, Argentina, which limits access to health-related grounds and cases of rape, is ranked higher. A brief explanation of the logic behind this ranking would have been helpful.
Overall, Díez’s book makes significant theoretical and empirical contributions to the fields of abortion reform and judicial politics. It advances the study of abortion politics by moving beyond approaches that focus solely on the role of social movements or doctrinal analysis, shedding light instead on the inner workings of courts. By focusing on that span of time between the filing of a case and the issuance of a ruling, Díez fills an important gap and deepens our understanding of why abortion reform has progressed in some cases and stagnated in others.
The Judicial Politics of Abortion in Latin America advances the study of abortion politics beyond social movements or doctrinal analysis, shedding light instead on the inner workings of courts.
Courts have increasingly become key political actors whose decisions carry far-reaching consequences. This has important implications beyond the specific case of abortion. Scholars interested in the role and functioning of courts in contemporary democracies will find this book particularly revealing. Díez convincingly shows that understanding judicial decisions also requires paying attention to the strategic bargaining among judicial actors. While the ideological positioning of justices and legal reasoning matter, he demonstrates that peer persuasion can at times push justices to rule against their own legal and ideological preferences.
Theoretically innovative, empirically grounded, and a genuine pleasure to read, The Judicial Politics of Abortion in Latin America is an important contribution to ongoing scholarly debates about the role of courts in advancing (or limiting) rights. Díez pushes this discussion further by situating the functioning of courts within broader historical and sociopolitical contexts. In doing so, it invites future researchers to pursue more context-sensitive analyses when identifying the causal drivers of judicial decision-making.
Juliana Jaramillo is Assistant Editor at the Review of Democracy.
