Comparative Law used by South American Constitutional Courts

It is noticeable that comparative law is playing an increasingly important role for legal actors. Indeed, judges, lawyers and legal scholars have been looking at foreign law in order to obtain more information about how the world has been dealing with legal issues, especially those that are morally controversial or when it involves the application of legal norms within a communitarian space. At this point, several European universities have been involved in areas of concentration regarding European and comparative law. On the other hand, the role of comparative law in other geographical areas has received significantly less attention. This work comes with a proposal to occupy part of that space relatively neglected by law scholars: how are South American countries using comparative law? Which countries' law is more influential? On what subjects? One way to investigate part of this object is to analyze how South American constitutional courts have been using comparative law. Certainly, because these are the courts that are at the top of the judicial hierarchy of those countries, the use of comparative law can be echoed among other operators of law, such as lawyers, professors, and law scholars. In this sense, this paper aims to identify elements of comparative law present in judicial decisions of South American constitutional courts, such as which countries are more influential, from which continents, or which sources are more frequently cited. This is exactly what this work is about. In the development of the work itself, the research dealt with each South American country separately, in order to identify the constitution, the constitutional court, and the existence of the constitutional judicial review. Likewise, in each country, the data collected in the research regarding the use of comparative law by South American constitutional courts was presented, making use of the parameters of comparison. Next, the work covered the comparison itself, where the data was cross-checked to verify interesting findings from the decisions of the constitutional courts, such as, for example, identifying the most cited countries, the most mentioned sources of foreign law, and other data. At the end, the paper discusses the conclusion drawn from all the comparison made and answers the questions that led to the making of the whole work.