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Abstract: Peru, like most other developing nations of Latin America, is a country preoccupied with its own social, economic, and political development. Thousands of legal dispositions are enacted each year with the specific purpose of fostering development. While these dispositions include basic sources of law, major developmental effects are achieved through the mass of administrative acts which represent the daily policymaking process of the Peruvian government. Once a general law is approved, it must be implemented through executive acts and regulations, leaving a margin for more frequent, more responsible modifications in the specifics of broadly-stated substantive rights and their administration. Peruvian lawyers customarily view their legal system in terms of several classes of norms, arranged in a hierarchy with the constitution at the top, legislation next, and executive acts at the bottom. The hierarchy of laws operates on the principle that whenever a conflict develops between the provisions of one law and those of another, the law which stands higher in the hierarchy prevails. This article presents a detailed discussion of the origins, nature, and effects of each type of legal norm in the Peruvian hierarchy. It is apparent that the hierarchical theory breaks down at points of conflict. These points of conflict best reveal the potential and the limitations of Peruvian legal institutions as means of social and economic development. The article concludes that the legal system is not greatly affected by the periodic changes from popularly-elected regime to military regime and back again.
Keywords: Peru, International Law, Choice of Law
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