The rigidity of the right to property in the Chilean Constitutional Court’s case law

Abstract

For several decades, some of the Constitutional Court’s case law has developed an extraordinarily rigid conception of the right to property, which radically protects the statu quo, to the detriment of other rights and the promotion of the public interest. This phenomenon cannot be attributed exclusively to the terms in which the right to property is formally enshrined in the Constitution, but is the result of the interpretative practices of the courts and other legal operators. In this paper, we identify these sources of rigidity and account for the unfavourable effects it entails, in terms of the sustainability of the institutions that structure the political community.