Abstract

Global descriptions of proportionality as a methodology, and the rulings that are flagged up to illustrate its operation, are regularly extracted from a handful of countries—North-Atlantic democracies and Global South jurisdictions whose rulings are available in English. This leaves in the shadow important dimensions of the practice, and supports contentions about global traits that are not always exact. This chapter discusses questions to be considered when thinking about enriching the global canon on proportionality with contributions from Latin America. It provides information about regional traits, including the distinctive status of Colombian constitutional doctrines and the existence of minority paradigms that are representative of alternative traditions. Afterwards, it identifies a set of rulings that should enter the global proportionality canon on different grounds: methodologic expansion, functional expansion, and thematic expansion. These rulings provide examples of proportionality being used to enforce social rights, combat state’s omissions, evaluate state’s insufficient or regressive action, or assess the measures taken in a process of transitional justice. A ruling that anticanonically uses proportionality to weaken the normative import of social rights is also identified and discussed.