The book launches with examples, concrete cases, or political confrontations to explain how to conceive the safeguards at stake. It portrays these as embodying principles requiring particular actions and the implementation of policies. For instance, free speech demands permitting seemingly offensive expression plus promoting a diverse and open public debate. The work scrutinizes specific guaranties, such as those pertaining to asylum, citizenship, abortion, due process, self-determination, or the environment. It presents them as engendering problems peculiar to them. Next, the discussion dissects how precepts, like human rights and democracy, may contingently clash despite their overall commensurability. Finally, it underscores the interconnection of negative, substantive, and national entitlements with their positive, procedural, and international counterparts. Throughout, ruminations on the following questions unfold: How may courts and governments respectively contribute to actualizing the liberties at issue? How do these bear upon social justice? How may ideologically opposed states nonetheless collaborate on them?

This casebook uniquely compares the law of Latin America to that of Europe, as well as the United States while introducing students to the richness and diversity of the Latin American legal tradition through cases, legal documents, and commentaries. This carefully designed book allows students to see the law in action and guides them through entire judicial decisions, demonstrating how litigation unfolds and how a different legal culture operates. It is currently the only cases and materials publication devoted to Latin American law and the issues that arise in concrete litigation south of the border.