Following a landslide electoral victory in June 2024, Mexico’s incoming president Claudia Sheinbaum will likely oversee the implementation of landmark judicial reform that could drastically alter the country’s criminal justice system. The reforms, introduced by outgoing president Andres Manuel Lopez Obredor (AMLO), contain provisions that would allow for federal and local judges to be elected through direct vote. How will the new judicial system be designed, and what risks and benefits are associated with the changes? What are the political and economic implications of the proposed reforms? How will they impact the efficiency of the criminal justice system?
The Georgetown Americas Institute hosted a virtual panel on Mexico’s upcoming judicial reform featuring Ana Laura Magaloni of the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE); Alejandro Werner, GAI founding director; and Tulane University’s Nora Lustig, who is also a GAI resident fellow.
This event was held in Spanish with simultaneous translation to English.
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Ana Laura Magaloni is currently the director of the division of legal studies at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económica (CIDE). She has been a visiting researcher at the European Law Research Center at Harvard University and a visiting professor of the International and Comparative Law Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. At the legal studies division of the Supreme Court, she worked in collaboration with peers at the Stanford Law School to design a new way of teaching law based on the study of problems and cases. This included empirical analysis of the impact of legal norms in society and in the political system. She is an editorialist at the Reforma newspaper, leads the TV program Full Justice, and participates as an analyst on security and justice on a radio newscast with Denise Maerker. Her research and publications focus on both system administration and enforcement of justice, as well as the Mexican Supreme Court. She currently holds a doctor of law from the Autonomous University of Madrid and a degree in law from Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico (ITAM).
Nora Lustig is a resident fellow with the Georgetown Americas Institute and Samuel Z. Stone Professor of Latin American Economics at Tulane University, where she also founded and directs the Commitment to Equity Institute (CEQ). Additionally, she is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the Center for Global Development, and the Inter-American Dialogue. Lustig’s research focuses on economic development, inequality, and social policies, particularly in Latin America. She is the editor of Commitment to Equity Handbook: Estimating the Impact of Fiscal Policy on Inequality and Poverty (2018), a guide to assessing the impact of taxation and social spending on inequality and poverty in developing countries. Lustig is a founding member and president emeritus of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (LACEA) and was a co-director of the World Bank’s World Development Report 2000, Attacking Poverty. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Economic Inequality and is a member of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality’s Executive Council. Lustig served on the Atkinson Commission on Poverty, the High-Level Group on Measuring Economic Performance and Social Progress, and the G20 Eminent Persons Group on Global Financial Governance. She received her doctorate in economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
Alejandro Werner is the founding director of the Georgetown Americas Institute and a non-resident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute. He recently completed almost nine years as director of the Western Hemisphere Department at the International Monetary Fund. Prior to that appointment, he was undersecretary of finance and public credit in Mexico’s Finance Ministry and held several positions in that ministry and the Central Bank. He also taught at leading universities in Mexico, Spain, and the United States. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.A. in economics from Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM).