Redrafting imperfect legislation

Structural judgments regarding socioeconomic rights and the judicial oversight of their enforcement are two phenomena that have recently characterized Latin American public law. This paper examines how these phenomena of judicial behaviour respond to certain deficiencies in legislation (e.g., incomplete law and legislative stalemate). Suboptimal legislation usually indicates that political actors cannot impose their preferences or reach satisfactory agreements due to high transaction costs, thus presenting an opportunity for judicial intervention. However, the same suboptimal legislation can also expose a degree of political reluctance or lack of state institutional capacity to implement appropriate policies. Without aiming to establish a comprehensive theory, this paper explores how structural judgments and the creation of judicial monitoring systems deal with these different aspects of imperfect legislation. The paper briefly provides an analytical framework and takes a new approach to examining three well-known case studies from Colombia, Argentina, and Peru.