–The Editors
Exactly six years ago on January 5, 2014, we published the very first edition of “What’s New in Public Law.”
Its format today is largely unchanged, and its purpose has remained the same: to update our readers on recent developments in public law around the world. Developments include news from constitutional and supreme courts, new scholarship in public law, calls for papers, and highlights from around the blogosphere.
As we enter this new calendar year, we take this occasion to recognize our outgoing 2019 team members for their contributions to I-CONnect: Davide Bacis, Vicente F. Benitez R., Angelique Devaux, Nausica Palazzo, and Sandeep Suresh. We thank them for being an integral part of our team!
We are also pleased to introduce the team that will bring you “What’s New in Public Law” throughout 2020. We thank each of the scholars below for the great service they will provide for the entire field of public law.
We invite you to get to know them with the bios they have prepared about themselves.
As a reminder, we welcome your submissions of items to include in “What’s New.” Please send them by email to contact.iconnect@gmail.com. We require weblinks for all submissions; we do not upload documents, whether in PDF, Word or otherwise.
Mohamed Abdelaal is an Assistant Professor of Law at Alexandria University Faculty of Law in Alexandria, Egypt and Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Indiana Robert H McKinney School of Law in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. He focuses his teaching and scholarship on the areas of Constitutional Law, Administrative Law, Comparative Law, and Islamic Law. Abdelaal has published widely on constitutional law and comparative law and he served as a presenter and panelist in several law conferences and workshops in USA. Meanwhile, he is licensed to practice law in Egypt and he is admitted as a certified arbitrator under the Egyptian Law. He is also a permanent member of the Egyptian American Rule of Law Association (EARLA), Washington D.C., and has been invited for three consecutive years (2012-2013-2014) to serve as an Egyptian expert to draft the Rule of Law Index Report sponsored by the World Justice Project (WJP).
Susan Achury is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Miami University, Oxford-Ohio. She holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Houston, a master’s degree in political science from the University of Texas at El Paso, and a law degree from La Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Her research focuses on the institutional design of judicial review in Latin America, specifically in how broad access and lower barriers of non-justiciability to constitutional justice increase courts’ influence on policy outcomes. Her research also evaluates gender and racial representation in the US judiciary, as well as, intra-parties, and electoral rules. At Miami University, Susan teaches courses on Constitutional Law.
Simon Drugda is a PhD Candidate in Law at the University of Copenhagen. He joined the Centre for European and Comparative Legal Studies (CECS) in September 2018, to work on a project on Judicial Reputation. His doctoral research builds on compliance-reputation theories proposed by Shai Dothan (2015) and Nuno Garoupa and Tom Ginsburg (2015). Simon investigates how three high courts in Denmark, Slovakia, and the United Kingdom manage their reputation through outreach activities and decision-making. Simon is a co-editor of the I·CONnect-Clough Global Review of Constitutional Law. His research interests are constitutional change, judicial speech, judicial studies, and all topics in comparative constitutional law.
Chiara Graziani is a Ph.D. Candidate and Research Fellow in Constitutional Law at the University of Genoa (Italy). She is also an academic fellow at Bocconi University, Milan (Italy). Her main research areas are human rights, national security and counter-terrorism measures, but she also studies other constitutional law-related issues, such as Brexit and its constitutional implications. Chiara published several works in Italian and in English and she was a visiting fellow in some foreign academic institutions, such as the Trinity College, Dublin (Ireland), the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg (Germany), the University of Valencia (Spain). She regularly takes part in conferences and seminars in Italy and abroad. She is a member of the IACL Research Group on Constitutional Responses to Terrorism and of the editorial boards of some Italian law journals.
Claudia Marchese is a Research Fellow in Comparative Public Law and Lecturer at the University of Milan (Italy). She is also a teaching assistant at the University of Naples “Suor Orsola Benincasa”. She holds a Ph.D. in Public Law from the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” and in recent years collaborated with the research office of the Italian Constitutional Court. She was a visiting fellow in the Centro de Estudios Politicos y Constitucionales, Madrid (Spain). Claudia has national and international publications in comparative public law and constitutional law. Her research interests include political rights, democracy, social rights, public finance, megacities and development.
Matteo Mastracci is a Ph.D. Candidate in Public Law at Koç University, Istanbul. His main research interests are European Union Law, Comparative Constitutional Law, International and Human Rights Law, Political Theory and Populist Constitutionalism. He holds a Bachelor Degree in Law from University of Teramo (Teramo, Italy), a postgraduate Degree in International Criminal Law and Corporate Crimes from LUISS School of Law (Rome, Italy) and an LL.M. degree in Public International Law and Human Rights from Riga Graduate School of Law (Riga, Latvia). Currently, as a doctoral researcher, he is conducting comparative studies on Populist Constitutionalism, Judicial Independence and Rule of Law, both at European and International level.
Teodora Miljojkovic is an S.J.D. student at Central European University, Budapest. Her research focuses on the principle of the rule of law as a constitutional value in illiberal democracies and its abuses. In her previous LL.M. thesis, she explored the role and impact of the constitutional courts in the democratization process of post-communist countries. Teodora is a member of the editorial board of Eudaimonia – Journal for Legal, Political and Social Theory and Philosophy. She is also a organizing team member of the Student Conference in Theory and Philosophy of Law at the University of Belgrade Law School.
Gaurav Mukherjee is an S.J.D. candidate in Comparative Constitutional Law at the Central European University, Budapest (CEU). Gaurav’s doctoral project examines the ways in which social rights cases adjudicated in courts in India, South Africa, and Kenya lead to participatory forms of judicial review that address concerns on polycentricity, institutional competence, and separation of powers. He is a co-convenor of the International Association of Constitutional
Law (IACL) Research Group on Social Rights. Gaurav was an Indian Equality Law Visiting Fellow at the University of Melbourne in Winter, 2019.
In 2018, Gaurav was awarded the Indian Law Review Early Career Prize for
Case/Legislative Notes for his article analysing the shortcomings in a decision
delivered by the Supreme Court of India on executive law-making power. His work
has been published or is forthcoming in a number of journals and online
publications, including the German Law Journal, the Oxford Human Rights Hub
Journal, the Indian Law Review, and the Verfassungsblog.
Eman Muhammad Rashwan is a Ph.D. candidate at the program of European Doctorate in Law & Economics (EDLE), University of Hamburg. She is also an Assistant Lecturer of Public Law at Cairo University, where she earlier obtained her bachelor of laws (English section) and her first Masters Degree in Public Law and Administrative Sciences. She holds a second LL.M. in Law and Government from American University, Washington College of Law, The USA. Eman has international publications in the different fields of public and international law. Her current research focuses on empirical legal studies and constitutional changes after revolutions.
Pedro Arcain Riccetto is a Ph.D candidate at the University of São Paulo (Brazil), currently researching at Harvard Kennedy School as a Democratic Governance Fellow (US). In the past three years he held research positions at the University of Oxford (UK), Yale University (US), Sciences Po (France), and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (Germany). Moreover, Pedro worked at the Brazilian Congress and the UK Parliament. His research interests include judicial politics, comparative government, and policy-making, with special focus in Latin America. For his dissertation, he proposes a model to analyze under which institutional circumstances the power granted to a Court to review constitutional amendments enhances democracy. He tests the model by performing a cross-country comparison of the Courts in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Peru.
Maja Sahadžić is Researcher at the Government and Law Research Group at the Faculty of Law, the University of Antwerp, where she earned her Ph.D. She conducts empirical and qualitative research on the concepts of constitutional asymmetry, multi-tiered systems, and multinationalism. She explores the concepts by using the indicators of constitutional asymmetries, QRQs, statistical methods, and QCA analyses in proving the link between constitutional asymmetry and multinationalism and investigating the effects of constitutional asymmetry on legitimacy and stability. Her work experience includes earlier academic positions at universities in B&H, Croatia, and the USA. She is also an expert legal advisor and lecturer.
Boldizsár Szentgáli-Tóth is a research fellow of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Institute for Legal Studies; and the Eotvos Loránd University, Department of Constitutional Law. He also serves as the research- and science manager of the Bibó István College of Advanced Legal Studies. He has defended his Ph.D thesis in November 2018, his topic was the past, present, and future of organic law. He also holds an LL.M degree of comparative constitutional law from the Central-European University, Budapest, and also an European- and Comparative law master 1. maitrise degree from the Université Panthéon Assas Paris II. He has published almost 100 academic contributions on either English and Hungarian language, and he has participated successfully as speaker in several international scientific forums.
Swapnil Tripathi is an attorney practising law in New Delhi, India. He read law at National Law University, Jodhpur (India) where he specialised in the Constitutional Law Hons. programme. He has served as a Teaching Assistant to Prof. I.P. Massey in the subjects of Comparative Constitutional Law and Administrative Laws and has also interned under Hon’ble Dr. Justice D.Y. Chandrachud (Judge, Supreme Court of India). He is a regular columnist on issues of constitutional law for leading news agencies and also runs his personal blog titled “The ‘Basic’ Structure” where he explains core constitutional law concepts for a common man’s understanding.
