Mapping Public Law: a critical account of Ius Commune Constitutionale in Latin America

Public law is obsessed with mapping. However, without a critical account of how mapping is produced, pathologies emerge. Global Constitutionalism´s editors, commenting on the end of the ‘West’, stated that ‘we should give up to the idea of a deep connection between constitutionalist ideas and geographical regions, countries or power constellations’. In this scenario, several scholars focus on Latin America, ‘the region where the debate on the future of constitutionalism is debated with more intensity and urgency’, and advocate for a concept with the ability to address ‘a new legal phenomena’: Ius Commune Constitutionale in Latin America. This endeavour attempts to give an account of the ‘original Latin American path of transformative constitutionalism’. Here, I critically address the main postulates of ICCAL and present a more precise intellectual map of Latin American constitutionalism.