L’Amérique latine, l’éveil juridique d’un continent ?

For the last three decades, Latin America has adopted legal innovations aimed at placing human rights at the center of the relationship between individuals and the State. This paper goes back to established Latin American precedents in order to answer two questions: How can such legal innovations lead to a more equitable management of resources? And to which extent do they contribute to social innovation? The point is to show that the ethnic question has not overshadowed the social question—far from it actually, as it has shed a new light on it. Latin American judges have been dealing with the ethnic question as a part of their reflection on human rights. In so doing, they have made the emergence of economic and social rights a judicial process by giving the control of resources-related policies to the courts. Courts have consequently opened their doors to political debates. However, despite the fact that the rule of law has been made effective, the potential for social innovation suffers from the inability of the legal system to make itself respected as a true check on political power.