Despite Porfirio Diaz's authoritarian rule (1877-1911) and the fifteen years of violent conflict typifying much of Mexican politics after 1917, law and judicial decision-making were important for the country's political and economic organization. Influenced by French theories of jurisprudence in addition to domestic events, progressive Mexican legal thinkers concluded that the liberal view of law--as existing primarily to guarantee the rights of individuals and of private property--was inadequate for solving the "social question"; the aim of the legal regime should instead be one of...