Community of Practice and the Ius Constitutionale Commune en América Latina

This chapter discusses a key area of Latin American doctrinal development regarding human rights: whether human rights sit at the international or constitutional level or, increasingly, at both levels. In recent years, a group of scholars has argued that the practice of human rights and constitutional rights in the region has given rise to an ius contitutionale in Latin America (ICCAL), or “a transformative constitutional project” that “seeks to achieve and promote human rights, democracy, and the rule of law and analyze how the region has embraced and implemented these constitutional normative values.” Lina M. Céspedes-Báez, Enrique Prieto-Rios, and Mónica Mazariegos-Rodas take on the many critics of the ICCAL theory, showing how the “communities of practice” in Latin America have strategically appropriated and mobilized transformative constitutionalism’s narratives and ways of interpreting the law to grant agency and guarantee the human rights of subalterns in the region.