On August 24, 2000, the Mexican Supreme Court resolved a constitutional conflict between opposition members of the lower chamber of Congress and President Ernesto Zedillo. The sentence granted a congressional committee access to a trust account previously housed in a failed bank, which the federal government had taken control of in the weeks preceding the 1994 peso crisis. The committee sought access to the trust's records, because it believed that the records might reveal a scheme to fund Zedillo's presidential campaign illegally. This was the first time in modern Mexican history that the Supreme Court challenged the power of the presidency in a case of such magnitude, and the court was quick to highlight it. Its ministers gave press conferences and interviews with various media outlets in which they detailed what the decision required of Zedillo and described their jurisprudential rationale. Although the court's primary public face was its president, Genaro Góngora Pimentel, the effort was collective. Practically every minister played a role. The court's public communication campaign was coordinated and aggressive.

The Supreme Court's reaction is not uniquely Mexican. Constitutional judges around the world engage the public through the media. Nearly every high court maintains a Web site where it houses information on pending and completed cases, descriptions of its jurisdiction, and biographical summaries of its membership. Of course, this is fairly passive communication. Like the members of the Mexican Supreme Court, constitutional judges are commonly more direct.