Perón's restructuring of Argentina's Supreme Court

Perón’s restructuring of Argentina’s Supreme Court turned a constitutional institution that might have constrained the executive into a vehicle for concentrated political power. In 1946, after Juan Domingo Perón’s election, his supporters moved against four of the Court’s five justices; three were impeached, a fourth resigned, and Perón appointed four new justices. The Court’s diminished independence became part of a broader pattern in which political leaders faced few institutional limits.

Constitutional Promise and Political Setting

Argentina’s 1853 constitution established a Supreme Court with responsibilities similar to those of the United States Supreme Court. An 1887 decision gave the Argentine Court authority to determine whether laws were constitutional, creating the possibility that it might become an important constraint within the political system. That possibility existed alongside a largely extractive order, however: broad social groups had little political empowerment, and political power was not pluralistically distributed.

Perón entered the presidency with a political base built partly through organized labor. A former colonel, he had first gained national prominence after the 1943 military coup appointed him minister of labor. In that position he built a coalition with trade unions and the labor movement, which later proved crucial to his presidential campaign. The Court’s confrontation with his government therefore unfolded amid disputes over both constitutional authority and the political arrangements through which Perón had gained support.

Impeachment and Replacement

Shortly before Perón’s election, the Supreme Court had ruled unconstitutional his proposed national labor relations board. The Court had also accepted the legality of the military regimes established in 1930 and 1943. After Perón took office, supporters in the Chamber of Deputies proposed impeaching four of the five justices, citing those decisions. The charge concerning the 1943 regime carried a particular irony: Perón himself had played a key role in the coup that brought it to power.

The attack on the Court had also been a campaign issue. Like Franklin D. Roosevelt in his 1936 reelection campaign, Perón criticized the judiciary during his 1946 campaign. Nine months after the impeachment process began, the Chamber of Deputies impeached three justices; the fourth had already resigned. The Senate approved the motion, and Perón appointed four new justices. The sequence did more than replace particular judges: it altered who occupied an institution with the formal authority to review government action.

Executive Power and Institutional Consequences

With new appointees on the bench, Perón faced fewer political constraints. The replacement justices, for example, upheld the constitutionality of the conviction of Ricardo Balbín, leader of the main opposition party, the Radical Party, for disrespecting Perón. The book presents the weakened Court as enabling Perón to exercise unchecked power, effectively allowing him to rule as a dictator.

The consequences extended beyond Perón’s presidency. After his regime was removed by a coup in 1955, Argentina entered a prolonged succession of military and civilian governments. Both kinds of regimes chose their own Supreme Court justices. The practice was not confined to military takeovers: after the return to democracy, presidents continued to treat the Court’s composition as something to remake. The account describes Perón’s successful restructuring as establishing a norm that each new president would handpick justices, undermining the Court’s potential role as a lasting restraint on executive authority.

Rule of Law and the Wider Argentine Pattern

The episode illustrates the difference between a constitutional court existing on paper and a court able to constrain those in power. Argentina had a formal constitutional review mechanism, but the wider political system lacked the pluralism and broad-based empowerment that might have sustained the Court’s independence. When political leaders could remove or replace judges, legal protections and institutional checks remained vulnerable to executive influence.

That vulnerability persisted within a system that held elections but concentrated power. The Perónist Party built electoral support through political machinery, patronage, vote-buying, and government contracts and jobs exchanged for political support. Later, when President Carlos Saúl Menem faced a term limit, he rewrote the constitution to remove it. The Court episode thus belongs to a recurring institutional pattern: formal democratic procedures coexisted with weak constraints, and presidents could reshape institutions rather than accept their limits. The contrast with the rule-of-law ideal is not simply that Argentina possessed different legal rules; it is that political power was not reliably bound by them.