Courts and constitutional scholars throughout Latin America routinely engage in processes of constitutional comparison. The article, however, provides a typology of the many different ways in which they can, and do, compare constitutionally –e. g., through ‘borrowing’ or transfer-oriented, genetic or genealogical forms of comparison; deliberative, empirical, reflective and /or moral-cosmopolitan forms of comparison. Each mode of comparison implies a somewhat different focus, has greater relevance under some constitutional theories than others, and can take ‘thinner’ or ‘thicker’ forms. And each is likely to be practised by different constitutional actors –i. e., in the case of deliberative, moral-cosmopolitan or transfer-oriented modes of comparison, by constitutional drafters, lawyers or judges, or in the case of (at least thick) empirical comparison, by constitutional scholars. But each has value and relevance in Latin America. The article further draws attention to the particular value for scholars working in the field of a form of empirical or ‘socio-legal’ comparison that embraces broad attention to constitutional context (including a constitution’s institutional, social, economic and political context) and attention to the insights of other disciplines, including history, sociology, comparative politics and economics /econometrics. In doing so, it outlines some basic principles of case-selection that can usefully guide processes of comparison of this kind. But it also calls for a realistic approach to these principles, which recognizes the strengths of different scholars in studying various constitutional systems, and the need for provisional, overlapping studies, which together contribute to robust findings about the origins and/or consequences of constitutional developments.