Precedente judicial en el contencioso administrativo: estudio desde las fuentes del derecho

Colombian legal history reflects the manner in which the country’s governing personalities and institutions have adapted to new social realities. Many changes have been responses to social demands for reforming government bodies, administrative practices, and legal, political, and social institutions to improve access to justice, equality, and the protection of people’s rights. Some of these demands have been expressed violently and others peacefully. In this context it is relevant to examine the sources of law —a traditional focus of legal studies— and to present research on the changes that the law has undergone as well as the appearance of new institutions that have strongly influenced the legal code and affected the existing institutional hierarchy.
Despite the fact that the Colombian system follows the Romano-Germanic System where its core principles are codified into legal texts that serve as the primary source of law, concepts such as legal prece-dent have taken on new importance as sources of law, modifying the classical conception of hierarchically organized and binding tradition. This is illustrated by Law 1437 of 2011, a legislative intervention that materialized the concept of legal precedence, establishing the Code of Public Administration and Admi-nistrative Procedures, the establishment of unification judgments, and the ability to extend their effects.
What is new in this work is the discussion regarding a new hierarchy of sources of law. While this is a theoretical discussion, it presents a series of concrete mechanisms to illustrate its points, mechanisms such as unification judgments and the extension of jurisprudence that may give a sense of the reach of legal precedent in Administrative Procedures.