Manuel García-Mansilla has resigned from Argentina’s Supreme Court four days after the Senate rejected his candidacy in an unprecedented vote. 

In a letter dated Monday, García-Mansilla said he had accepted his appointment by decree because the top court’s two vacancies constituted “a serious institutional problem that required an urgent solution.” 

However, he continued by saying that remaining in his role that he held for 39 days after the Senate voted against it would not help to solve this issue. He also accused the opposition of having political motivations for the vote.

According to the publicly accessible judicial ruling system, he was involved with 215 rulings and more than 30 administrative resolutions during his short-lived tenure as a Supreme Court Justice.

Argentina’s Senate voted against García-Mansilla’s candidacy Thursday evening with 51 negative votes from Peronism, Radical Civic Union (UCR) and Propuesta Republicana (PRO), to 20 affirmative votes mainly from the ruling party La Libertad Avanza (LLA).

Milei appointed García-Mansilla by decree in February, along with federal judge Ariel Lijo, who was also rejected by the Senate. 

Supreme Court Justices in Argentina must be approved by a Senate majority of two thirds. A constitutional provision allows the president to appoint them by decree when the Senate is in recess. 

However, constitutional specialists point out this dates to a period when senators had to travel between their provinces and the capital by carriage, and could be away for months.

The upper house was on a break of just one week when Milei appointed García-Mansilla and Lijo. Despite these concerns, García-Mansilla was sworn in on February 27, and insisted that his appointment was legitimate. 

Lijo had not been sworn in when the Upper House debate took place, meaning the only Justice to assume functions before being approved by the Senate was García-Mansilla. 

In August 2024, García-Mansilla had said in a public hearing in Congress that although he considered this type of move to be constitutional, he “would not have accepted” to be named in those circumstances in 2015, when a similar situation took place. In his resignation letter, he said that, when he was appointed in February, he felt that he now had to “take on the responsibility to help solve the serious issue” of the Supreme Court having only three members.

“Although I would have liked to [be a Justice] for a longer period of time and under different circumstances, me remaining in this position will not make it easier for the Supreme Court seats to be filled,” García-Mansilla said in his letter. “Very much the contrary: it will serve as another excuse to divert the attention of those who have to provide an urgent solution to a long-standing issue.”

A constitutional crisis for the courts

If García-Mansilla had insisted on remaining in office after the Senate rejected his candidacy, it would have opened the door to a legal wrangle in which all rulings in which he had participated could have been challenged on the grounds that his position on the court was illegitimate.

Argentina’s Supreme Court has five seats, but it had been operating with just three members. Elena Highton de Nolasco resigned in October 2021 and Juan Carlos Maqueda retired after turning 75 in December, the age limit for Supreme Court Justices.

Gustavo Arballo, who is a constitutional law professor at University of La Pampa, told the Herald that “the number of cases that could be subject to voluntary litigation is very small.” In an X post, Arballo said that García-Mansilla signed 215 rulings while he was a Supreme Court Justice, but “in 80% of them his decision did not impact the final result.”

García-Mansilla’s appointment had been severely questioned by human rights organizations and feminists not only for considering it unconstitutional, but also for considering him a poor candidate for the Supreme Court due to his conservative views.

A specialist in constitutional and business law, as well as the Oil&Gas sector, in 2012 García-Mansilla gave a speech questioning a key Supreme Court ruling known as “fallo F.A.L.” which he described as the “Argentine Roe v. Wade.” The ruling set a precedent that allowed for rape victims to interrupt their pregnancies if they wished to, up until abortion became legal in 2020.

For García-Mansilla, the ruling was “inadmissible” because Argentine law “explicitly acknowledges one is a person and a human since the moment of conception.” In that same ruling, he dismissed international agreements, saying they are “inferior to the Constitution.