El juicio de amparo — a rights remedy wider than habeas corpus
The Mexican constitutional action that lets any inhabitant ask a federal judge to protect any right the constitution grants — not only personal liberty — against a law or an act of any authority, and that pays for that breadth with a rule its own drafters wrote in: the judgment protects the complainant and says nothing about the law. Read from the 1881 essay by the president of the Mexican Supreme Court and from the text of the 1857 constitution reprinted in its appendix.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts of the amparo almost all describe it as Mexico's version of habeas corpus and stop. This object works from the 1881 printing itself and quotes the pages: the definition in the words of the sitting president of the Mexican Supreme Court, the eight articles of the 1857 constitution he lists as protected, the constitutional text of articles 101 and 102 from the appendix, the relative-effect clause that leaves the unconstitutional law standing, the identical clause already written in the Acta de reformas of 1847, the same author's admission that the 1847 article was dead letter for want of an implementing statute, the failed poder conservador of 1836 that preceded both, and the rule that shuts the amparo out against private persons where the American writ reaches. It also states what the volume does not show — it carries no evidence for the Rejón authorship story — instead of repeating it.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The remedy is defined in 1881 by Ignacio L. Vallarta, then president of the Mexican Supreme Court, as "el proceso legal intentado para recuperar sumariamente cualquiera de los derechos del hombre consignados en la Constitucion y atacados por una autoridad de cualquiera categoría que sea, ó para eximirse de la obediencia de una ley ó mandato de una autoridad que ha invadido la esfera federal ó local respectivamente". Two things follow from the wording: the protected object is the whole catalogue of constitutional rights, and the defendant is an authority of any rank.
Vallarta then enumerates what that catalogue contained, and the list is the point: the amparo lay against slavery (article 2), against restrictions on thought, speech and the press (articles 6 and 7), on conscience and worship (article 1 of the Reforms of 25 September 1873), on teaching (article 3), on work and industry (article 4), on assembly (article 9), on movement (article 11), and against arrest or detention that was arbitrary or prolonged beyond three days (article 19). Personal liberty is one item on a list, not the list.
That breadth is the ground of the comparison the book was written to make. Vallarta argues that the habeas corpus "no asegura más que la libertad personal, y esto, dejándola en muchos casos sin proteccion, mientras que nuestro recurso comprende y abarca no solo ese derecho, sino todos los otros que consigna la Constitucion", and states that in Mexico the habeas corpus has never existed with the character it has in England and the United States. The comparative judgement of "superioridad" is his, made in defence of the jurisprudence of the court he presided over, and is carried here as the claim of an interested and well-placed witness rather than as a settled finding.
The constitutional text is narrower and more exact than the essay. Article 101 of the federal constitution of 1857, as reprinted in the appendix of the same volume, gives the federal courts every controversy raised "por leyes ó actos de cualquiera autoridad que violen las garantías individuales", plus federal acts injuring state sovereignty and state acts invading the federal sphere. Article 102 requires the proceeding to be begun at the petition of the aggrieved party — there is no amparo without a complainant.
The same article 102 writes the remedy's central limitation into the constitution itself: the judgment "será siempre tal que solo se ocupe de individuos particulares limitándose á protegerlos y ampararlos en el caso especial sobre que verse el proceso, sin hacer ninguna declaracion general respecto de la ley ó acto que la motivare". An unconstitutional law defeated in an amparo stays on the statute book and stays enforceable against everyone who has not sued. The protection is real and it is retail.
That clause was not an 1857 invention. Vallarta quotes article 25 of the Acta de reformas of 18 May 1847, which already ordered the federal courts to protect any inhabitant of the republic in the exercise and conservation of the rights granted by the constitution against any attack by the legislative and executive powers, whether federal or of the states, "limitándose dichos Tribunales á impartir su proteccion en el caso particular sobre que verse el proceso, sin hacer ninguna declaracion general respecto de la ley ó del acto que lo motivase" — the same formula, ten years earlier.
The 1847 article did nothing. Vallarta's own verdict on it is that "por desgracia este precepto constitucional fué letra muerta que ningunas aplicaciones prácticas tuvo, quizá por la falta de su ley reglamentaria". A constitutional right of action with no procedural statute behind it was, on the testimony of the remedy's own champion, unusable for a decade.
Before 1847 the same problem had been attacked from the opposite direction and failed worse. The second constitutional law of 29 December 1836 created a "poder conservador" charged with guarding the constitution and empowered to declare void a law or decree, an act of the executive, and even acts of the Supreme Court itself; Vallarta records that Mexican history had already pronounced on the sterility of that attempt and that Mexican publicists had condemned the governing idea behind it. The amparo's design — a court, a complainant, one case — is a reaction to a general censor that answered to nobody.
A second limit runs the other way from the American writ. Because the constitution gives the amparo only against laws or acts "de cualquiera autoridad", Vallarta records that Mexican jurisprudence had decided uniformly and without a single exception that the remedy does not lie against the acts of private persons, where the North American habeas corpus does. His justification is that such acts are ordinary crimes for the ordinary authorities, which is an argument about institutional competence and not a denial that private captivity happens — he says expressly that the law does not leave such attacks "sin remedio ni reparacion".
What this volume cannot support should be said plainly, because it is the part most often asserted. Searched inside for Rejón, for the Yucatán constitution of 1841 and for Mariano Otero, the book returns nothing on the authorship of the amparo: Yucatán appears only in later case reports and in lists of constitutional signatories. The standard genealogy — Manuel Crescencio Rejón's Yucatán project of 1841, taken up by Otero in 1847 — is not evidenced here, and this object does not assert it.