MEXICO Trends and Developments Contributed by: Aldo Ocampo and Arturo Caballero Rossetti, OCAMPO 1890
short-term disruption but prolongs the period of uncertainty as to the tenure of sitting judges. The Amparo Law reconfigured In parallel, the reform to the Amparo Law published on 16 October 2025 and in force from the following day altered three mechanisms that insurers habitually relied upon in their defence strategy. The first is legitimate interest. Article 5 (I) now requires that the challenged act cause a legal injury that is “real and differentiated from that of the rest of the popula- tion”. The standard excludes hypothetical or contin- gent harm and materially raises the cost of strategic litigation against regulatory acts and against judicial criteria of general reach. The second is the stay. Article 128 now expressly incorporates the balancing of the appearance of good right against the social interest, and new grounds for denying interim relief were added. This must be read together with the constitutional supremacy reform published on 31 October 2024, which rendered amp- aro, constitutional controversy and actions of uncon- stitutionality inadmissible against amendments to the Constitution itself, and ordered pending matters to be dismissed as inadmissible. The third is the transitional regime. The Third Transi- tional Article provides that concluded procedural stag- es are governed by the provisions in force when the proceeding began, while steps taken after the entry into force are subject to the new decree, “without this entailing retroactive application”. The formula is delib- erately ambiguous and is already generating disputes: an amparo filed before 17 October 2025 may become subject to the new rules on interim relief in respect of subsequent procedural steps. The authors recom- mend that insurers with portfolios of pending amparo proceedings map this exposure on a case-by-case basis. The aggregate effect is a substantial reduction in the insurer’s ability to obtain interim protection and to challenge, through extraordinary means, criteria it considers contrary to law. Defence is now concentrat- ed, more than ever, on ordinary proceedings and on
the quality of the file built from the moment of claims adjustment. The consolidation of a pro-victim doctrine in civil liability The line of case law with the greatest consequences for the sector does not derive from the judicial reform, but from a doctrinal construction begun more than a decade ago that reached its point of consolidation in 2025–2026. The technical starting point is Amparo in Review 915 / 2019 , decided by the First Chamber on 27 May 2020, in which Quálitas Compañía de Seguros was a petitioner. The Chamber held that “a compensation system based on the existence of caps, tariffs or max- imum amounts prevents the quantification of compen- sation from addressing the specific characteristics of each case”, and declared Articles 494 and 495 of the Federal Labour Law unconstitutional insofar as they set maximum limits on civil compensation. Relief was granted to the victim and denied to the insurer. That criterion was elevated to the full court in 2026. Sitting en banc on 3 February 2026, deciding the case of a child with congenital deafness to whom an insurer had denied cochlear implant cover, the court held by a majority of eight votes that compensation must be paid without statutory caps where integral reparation of harm is at stake; that moral damages arising from discriminatory acts are of indeterminate amount, even where a figure is proposed in the statement of claim; and that the judge must extend jurisdiction so as to hear jointly the claim for performance of the policy – commercial in nature – and the claim for moral damag- es – civil in nature. This last holding has considerable procedural effect: it removes the objection as to the appropriate procedural route that the sector regularly raised, and consolidates in a single proceeding claims that were previously fragmented. In the same session, deciding Direct Amparos in Review 5225 / 2025 and 5506 / 2024 , the court reiter- ated that the victim’s economic situation is irrelevant to the quantification of non-pecuniary moral damages and that taking their income into account is discrimi- natory. The criterion removes an argument historically used to moderate awards.
194 I NSURANCE L I T IGATI O N 2026
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