I·CONnect

—Richard Albert, William Stamps Farish Professor of Law, The University of Texas at Austin

In my capacity as Chair of the AALS Section on Comparative Law, I have created a new award to recognize untenured scholars at AALS Member Schools for excellence in comparative law. I invite our readers to submit nominations for the award, which will be named the “Mark Tushnet Prize in Comparative Law.” Self-nominations are welcome as well. The Call for Nominations follows below.

Mark Tushnet Prize in Comparative Law

Call for Nominations

The AALS Section on Comparative Law is pleased to announce the inaugural “Mark Tushnet Prize” to recognize scholarly excellence in any subject of comparative law by an untenured scholar at an AALS Member School.

The Prize will be given to the author(s) of a scholarly article judged to have made an important contribution in the field of comparative law. This article must have been published in an academic journal between July 1, 2018 and June 30, 2019.

The Prize will be awarded for the first time at the 2020 AALS Annual Meeting, scheduled for January 2-5, 2020. It will be awarded every year thereafter. All untenured scholars—including but not limited to tenure-track professors, visiting assistant professors, lecturers, academic fellows, doctoral candidates—are eligible.

Nominations should be sent by email to Trish Do (tdo@law.utexas.edu) no later than 12:00pm Central time on August 1st, 2019. Nominations should include the full name, institutional affiliation, and contact information for the nominated scholar, in addition to a PDF version of the published article to be considered for the Prize. Self-nominations are welcomed.

For all questions, please contact Professor Richard Albert (richard.albert@law.utexas.edu), Chair of the AALS Section on Comparative Law.

Prize Committee

• Richard Albert (Texas) (Chair)
• Mark Kende (Drake)
• Margaret Woo (Northeastern)

About Mark Tushnet

Mark Tushnet, a former president of the Association of American Law Schools, is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. A former law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall, Tushnet is an authoritative voice in constitutional law and theory. His scholarship spans all areas of public law, including comparative constitutional law, a field in which he has co-authored a leading casebook. A respected teacher, a devoted mentor, and an influential scholar, he will retire from the Harvard faculty in June 2020.

About the AALS

The Association of American Law Schools (AALS) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit association of 179 law schools. Its members enroll most of the nation’s law students and produce the majority of the country’s lawyers and judges, as well as many of its lawmakers. The mission of AALS is to uphold and advance excellence in legal education. In support of this mission, AALS promotes the core values of excellence in teaching and scholarship, academic freedom, and diversity, including diversity of backgrounds and viewpoints, while seeking to improve the legal profession, to foster justice, and to serve our many communities–local, national, and international. Founded in 1900, AALS also serves as the learned society for the more than 9,000 law faculty at its member schools, and provides them with extensive professional development opportunities, including the AALS Annual Meeting which draws thousands of professors, deans and administrators.

—Simon Drugda, PhD Candidate at the University of Copenhagen

In this weekly feature, I-CONnect publishes a curated reading list of developments in public law. “Developments” may include a selection of links to news, high court decisions, new or recent scholarly books and articles, and blog posts from around the public law blogosphere.

To submit relevant developments for our weekly feature on “What’s New in Public Law,” please email contact.iconnect@gmail.com.

Developments in Constitutional Courts

1. The Constitutional Court of Germany ruled that obliging email service providers to log and share IP addresses with law enforcement is constitutional.
2. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that bankrupt oil and gas companies in Alberta must use funds to reclaim oil and gas well sites before paying debtors.
3. The European Court of Human Rights held that the Russian government must pay the Georgian government ten million EUR in reparations over the deportation of 1,500 Georgian nationals.
4. The Supreme Court of Venezuela prohibited opposition leader Juan Guaidó from leaving the country.
5. The Slovak Constitutional Court invalidated a 2014 constitutional amendment that established a vetting process for lower court judges and candidates for judicial office.
6. The Constitutional Committee of the Slovak Parliament interviewed 40 nominees for Constitutional Court judges, in the first selection hearings broadcast live in the history of Slovakia. Robert Fico, a three-time PM is one of the candidates.

In the News

1. A senior judge resigned from office on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia claiming political interference.
2. The Irish government has agreed to hold a constitutional referendum to ease the country’s restrictions on divorce after the Parliament.
3. The government coalition in Luxembourg proposes a new constitution.
4. The Parliament of the German state of Brandenburg passed new legislation to boost the number of women in politics. The “parity act” obliges political parties to offer as many female as male candidates for elections, starting in the summer of 2020.

New Scholarship

1. The Journal Verfassung und Recht in Übersee published two special issues on “The Indian Supreme Court in Crisis?” and “Judicial Review and Democratization in Francophone West Africa.”
2. Urszula Jaremba and Juan Mayoral, The Europeanization of national judiciaries: definitions, indicators and mechanisms, 3 Journal of European Public Policy (2019) (critically examining the concept of Europeanization of national judiciaries, whereby national court act as decentralized European Union judges)
3. Benjamin Schonthal, Buddhist Legal Pluralism? Looking again at Monastic Governance in South and Southeast Asia, 3 Buddhism, Law & Society(2018) (looking at the plural interactions of state law and Buddhist law in South and Southeast Asia)
4. Brice Dickson, The Irish Supreme Court: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (2019) (examining the workings and jurisprudence of the Supreme Court of Ireland since its creation in 1924)
5. Sergio Verdugo, How Can Judges Challenge Incumbent Dictators and Get Away With It? (2019) (exploring the paradox of compliance with unfavorable judicial decisions in an authoritarian regime)

Call for Papers and Announcements

1. Ghent University in Belgium invites applications for a full-time, tenured Assistant Professorship in Privacy Law. The deadline for applications is February 26, 2019.
2. The Global Citizenship Governance Project, funded by an ERC starting Grant and co-hosted by the European University Institute and the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, invites applications for a Research Associate position. The deadline for applications is March 1, 2019.
3. The Centre of Excellence for International Courts (iCourts) and PluriCourts (Centre for the Study of the Legitimate Roles of the Judiciary in the Global Order) organize their 7th PhD Summer School on June 17-21, 2019. The deadline for applications is February 1, 2019.
4. The American Society of Comparative Law (ASCL) invites proposals for concurrent panels and a works in progress conference on the theme “Comparative Law and International Dispute Resolution Processes,” to be at the University of Missouri School of Law on October 17-19, 2019. The submission deadline is May 20.
5. UCD Sutherland School of Law invites applications for the post of an Assistant Professor in Constitutional Law. The deadline for applications is February 25, 2019.
6. The British and Irish Chapter of ICON-S holds its second annual conference on April 24-25, 2019, in Strathclyde. The theme of the conference is “The United Kingdom’s Withdrawal from the European Union (?): Domestic and European Constitutional Implications.” The deadline for proposals for papers and panels is February 15, 2019.
7. The National University of the Public Service (NUPS), the Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church (KGURC), and the Centre for Parliamentary Studies (CPS) based at the Széchenyi University Győr invite submissions for a conference on “Parliaments, chambers, legislatures.” The deadline for submission of paper proposals is March 15, 2019.
8. Felipe Oliveira de Sousa and Alex Latham organize a special workshop on “Constitutionalism and Disagreement,” to be held on July 7-13, 2019, at the occasion of the IVR Conference 2019. Interested participants should send their abstracts to f.oliveiradesousa@maastrichtuniversity.nl or a.g.latham@swansea.ac.uk by March 1.
9. The Journal of the Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies invites submission to the 2019 issue. The deadline for submissions is February 10, 2019.
10. The UCL Journal of Law and Jurisprudence invites submissions for the autumn 2019 issue. The deadline for submissions is March 25, 2019.

Elsewhere Online

1. Andrew Denny, Would a Bill Seeking an Article 50 Extension Require a Money Resolution Proposed by the Government?, UK Constitutional Law Association
2. Mark Elliott, Can the Government veto legislation by advising the Queen to withhold royal assent?, Public Law for Everyone
3. Meg Russel, Should we worry if MPs seize control of the parliamentary agenda?, The Constitution Unit
4. David R. Cameron, House of Commons calls for replacing Irish “backstop” with “alternative arrangements”, Yale MacMillan Center
5. Arthur Dyevre, Have British judges already left the EU? The impact of the Brexit vote on EU law in the UK, LSE Brexit Blog
6. Kangnikoé Bado, Togo’s continuing constitutional crisis and ECOWAS’s failed mediation effort, ConstitutionNet
7. David Pozen, Hardball, Again, Balkinization
8. Malthe Hilal-Harvald, Truth or dare? Blasphemy and the flawed logic of E.S. v. Austria, Völkerrechtsblog
9. Freeke Bendels, Arthur Dossche, Jurgen Goossens, and Sien Devriendt, Urgenda en de scheiding der machten: lost de rechter het klimaatvraagstuk op?, BelConLawBlog
10. Theodora Kostakopoulou, Who Should Be a Citizen of the Union? Toward an Autonomous European Union Citizenship, Verfassungsblog
11. Sebastián Mantilla Blanco, Rival Governments in Venezuela: Democracy and the Question of Recognition, Verfassungsblog
12. Lucy Geddes, Universal jurisdiction to the rescue: a way forward for victims of Franco-era crimes of gender-based violence?, OxHRH
13. Zim Nwokora , Book review: ‘The Politico-Legal Dynamics of Judicial Review: A Comparative Analysis’ by Theunis Roux, IACL-AIDC Blog

ICON·S | The International Society of Public Law is pleased to announce that its 2019 Annual Conference will be held at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in Santiago, on July 1-3, 2019. This will be the sixth Annual Conference of ICON·S, following the five Annual Conferences (Florence 2014, New York 2015, Berlin 2016, Copenhagen 2017, Hong Kong 2018) which have been overwhelmingly successful, thanks to the support of our Members.

ICON·S now invites panel and paper submissions for the 2019 Annual Conference on “Public Law in Times of Change?”.

Public law is facing a myriad of new challenges – including rising popular distrust in government, increasingly closed borders, and complex economic and technological change. We are arguably living in hard times for global public law. But will these challenges result in radical changes to the field as we know it, or will public law adapt and respond in ways that reinterpret and reinvigorate its core commitments to democracy, the rule of law, and human rights in a manner that is continuous with our current practices?

Countries around the world are witnessing the reversal of longstanding democratic gains, and new authoritarian threats. Yet there are signs of resilience in the global and national public law order: popular referenda have delivered gains as well as losses for democracy; women and young people have marched in defence of public law values; and justice is being crowd-sourced and data-driven, not just undermined by foreign cyber-attacks and “fake news”.

Under the strain of technological changes and shifts in economic globalisation, the world is also confronting large-scale changes in the structure and scope of global governance and of the “administrative” state. The Welfare State is under “siege” and at both international and domestic levels the problem of economic injustice is dominating the political and socio-economic debate around the globe.

International and regional bodies are re-orienting their focus to respond to these new challenges. And commitments to constitutional and administrative reform likewise remain strong in many legal orders. They continue to engage in formal processes of constitutional review, often as part of a transition from authoritarian to democratic, and colonial to post-colonial rule: from Chile to Myanmar, Bolivia to Tuvalu, Yemen to Sudan, and from the Philippines to Gambia. Many countries are actively debating proposals for major constitutional and legal reform. Others are grappling with the legacies of past reforms and transitions, and asking whether they were sufficient to address legacies of colonialism, and the abuse of human rights, and flagrant disregard for the rule of law.

But how far can public law go in responding to these issues? Are the sources of the current democratic crisis so deeply economic and structural that they evade any meaningful public law response? Are they rooted in debates over national identity and borders, which public law can address only partially and indirectly at best? Or does public law have the resources to adapt and respond to these challenges? Can public law, for example, help shape the future direction of state and global governance, or will changes in national and international governance in fact reshape public law as we know it?

This Annual Conference will seek to address these and related issues, bringing together leading scholars, political leaders and jurists from around the world to debate these questions, and their relevance to Latin America, their own countries, and the world.

The Conference will feature a keynote address by Justice Luís Roberto Barroso of the Supreme Federal Court of Brazil, as well as three plenary sessions featuring prominent jurists, intellectuals and judges, focused on the general themes of the Conference. A provisional program can be found here. At the heart of the Conference, however, are the concurrent sessions during the three-day conference which will be devoted to the papers and panels selected through this Call.

ICON·S particularly welcomes proposals for fully-formed panels, but also accepts individual papers dealing with any aspect of the Annual Conference’s themes. Paper and panel proposals may focus on any theoretical, historical, comparative, empirical, jurisprudential, ethical, behavioral, ethnographic, philosophical or practical, policy-oriented perspective related to public law, including administrative law, constitutional law, international law, criminal law, immigration and citizenship law and human rights and may address domestic, subnational, national, regional, transnational, supranational, international and global aspects of public law.

We strongly encourage the submission of fully-formed panels. Panel proposals should include at least three papers by scholars who have agreed in advance to participate, and panel must be formed in accordance with the Society’s commitment to gender balance. Such fully-formed panel proposals should also identify one or two discussants, who may also serve as panel chair and/or paper presenter. Please kindly note that each participant can present not more than 2 papers and participate – as presenter, chair or discussant – in 4 panels maximum.

Proposals of fully formed panels may be made of – or include some – papers written and presented in Spanish. In these latter cases, paper abstracts and/or panel description must in any event be submitted in English.

Concurrent panel sessions will be scheduled over two days. Each concurrent panel session will be scheduled for 90 minutes.

We invite potential participants to refer to the ICON·S Mission Statement when choosing a topic or approach for their papers or panels.

ICON·S is by no means restricted to public lawyers! We particularly welcome panel proposals that offer genuinely multi-disciplinary perspectives from various areas of law (including civil, criminal, tax, and labor law), as well as from scholars in the humanities and the social sciences (e.g. history, economics, political science, sociology) with an interest in the Conference’s themes. We welcome submissions from both senior and junior scholars (including doctoral students) as well as interested practitioners.

All submissions must be made through the ICON·S website by 23h59 GMT on March 9, 2019. To access the submission page, you need to be a member of ICON·S. Please register or log in with your existing ICON·S account and make sure you have paid your membership fee.

Successful applicants will be notified by April 1, 2019.

All participants will be responsible for their own travel and accommodation expenses.

We very much look forward to receiving your paper and panel proposals.

See you at ICON·S Santiago 2019!

Lorenzo Casini & Rosalind Dixon
Co-Presidents of ICON·S

Richard Albert, Gráinne de Búrca, Mariana Canales, Claudia Golden, Ran Hirschl, David Landau, Ruth Rubio Marin, Francisco Urbina, Cristián Valenzuela, Sergio Verdugo, Joseph Weiler and Fred Felix Zaumseil
Members of the ICON·S 2019 Organizing Committee

—Richard Albert, William Stamps Farish Professor of Law, The University of Texas at Austin

In “Five Questions” here at I-CONnect, we invite a public law scholar to answer five questions about her or his research. 

This edition of “Five Questions” features a short video interview with Sabrina Ragone, Associate Professor of Comparative Law at the University of Bologna. 

One of her most recent publications is an edited volume on “Managing the Euro Crisis: National EU Policy Coordination in the Debtor Countries” (Routledge 2017), available here.

To nominate someone for a future edition of “Five Questions,” please email contact.iconnect@gmail.com.