American model of constitutional dialogue: in the cases of Aikhin and Antilef before the Constitutional Court of Chile

For a long time, public law was predominantly subordinated to the norms established by national legislation, and therefore did not want to be studied in comparative jurisprudence, as the dominant importance of law within legocentric models made public law a radically national field of study. In constitutional law, the most emblematic and therefore most widely studied uses are, but are not limited to: transnational judicial dialogue, ‘the migration of constitutional ideas and the technique of transplants or constitutional loans’. Of these various uses, however, transnational judicial dialogue is perhaps the technique most often employed by a constitutional judge. It has been repeatedly used as a tool to provide reasoned support for the position taken by the majority, as well as to support a vote that deviates from the majority position. The judicial dialogue of the Constitutional Court with international courts is not limited to judicial decisions. From the outset, the Court also engages in dialogue with documents issued by bodies of the Inter-American human rights system that are less binding than judicial convictions, which are considered recommendations of international bodies, such as advisory opinions of the Inter-American Court and Commission and recommendations of the Committee on Freedom of Association of the International Labour Organization. In the case of dialogues between constitutional courts, this can be presented in different ways when a judge raises the issue of a foreign constitutional model and how it works in comparative constitutional justice decisions. It also arises when the Court refers to a decision or a line of decisions of a foreign constitutional court in its argumentation, offering it as a contribution to the domestic constitutional debate. Usually, the decision with which the Constitutional Court establishes a dialogue belongs to the countries of historical reference, be it the decisions of the US Supreme Court or the constitutional courts of Germany, France, England or Spain and, although to a lesser extent, the research also showed references to Latin American courts.