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What’s New: Week of April 6

– Wilson Seraine da Silva Neto, PhD Candidate in Law & Economics at the Faculty of Law, University of Lisbon; Assistant Professor at the University of Coimbra.

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 iconnecteditors@gmail.com.

Developments in Constitutional Courts

  1. Azerbaijan’s Supreme Court has upheld the conviction and nine-year prison sentence of a prominent opposition activist concluding a more than two-year legal process that one rights group has characterized as “a serious departure from the rule of law.”
  2. The US Supreme Court has returned a challenge to the State of Colorado’s ban on “conversion therapy” to lower courts. The Court voted 8-1 to allow a licensed counselor’s claim that the ban on treatment intended to change the sexual orientation or gender identity, on the grounds that it violated her First Amendment rights to free speech.
  3. The Angola Supreme Court in Uganda has deferred hearing a challenge to the controversial Anti-Homosexuality Act, 2023. Originally scheduled for hearing on March 31, the hearing has now been postponed to a date that has not yet been announced.
  4. The Constitutional Court of Latvia held unconstitutional a regulation requiring the national broadcaster to provide state-funded media in languages other than the state language, such as Russian. The challenge was raised by members of the Latvian Saeima (legislature), and the Court accepted their claim that the regulation undermined Latvian as the state language and threatened national security.
  5. Pakistan’s Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) upheld as valid a marriage between Maria Bibi, a 13-year-old Christian girl, and a Muslim man named Shehryar Ahmad, rejecting a petition for habeas corpus filed by the girl’s father who had argued that she was a minor and had been held illegally. The Court accepted the claim that she had converted to Islam and validated the marriage under Islamic law.

In the News:

  1. The Supreme Court of Canada will not hear an appeal challenging the constitutionality of Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system, which governed by the Canada Elections Act, and establishes that a candidate who receives the most votes in their riding is elected to Parliament.
  2. The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Barbara v. Trump, a case involving a challenge to an executive order that will restrict citizenship for US-born citizens with non-citizen parents. The case will examine the scope of the US Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, and specifically, the citizenship clause.
  3. Portugal’s Assembly of the Republic approved revisions to the Nationality Law, following a previous Constitutional Court ruling that had struck down four out of seven of the original provisions.
  4. The US Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Pitchford v. Cain, a case that challenges a conviction and sentence of death penalty on the premise that it was achieved in violation of the Constitution’s prohibition on racial discrimination in jury selection, and accordingly breached the guarantee of equal justice under law.
  5. In the US, two candidates for the State of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court had a heated public debate on several controversial political issues, reflecting increasing judicial polarization.
  6. The Portugal Parliament held a session to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Portuguese Constitution.

New Scholarship

  1. Michael Conklin, The Twenty-Second Amendment and a Trump third term: an Empirical Analysis of Constitutional Consensus in academia (2026, SSRN) (contributes both an empirical foundation and a normative framework for evaluating of the possibility of a Presidential third term)
  2. Masahiko Kinoshita, Multi-textual Constitutions in Japan: Their History, Functions, and Operations (2026, SSRN) (explores the history, functions, and operations of Japanese constitutional multitextuality).
  3. Amal Sethi, Elites and Constitutional Legitimacy (forthcoming 2027, Raffael Fasel and Lars Vinx (eds), Cambridge Handbook of Critical Perspectives on the Constituent Power) (shows that constitution-making is always performed by particular actors whose choices can be identified and assessed).
  4. Michael L. Smith, Relativity and Constitutional Time (forthcoming 2027, 129 West Virginia Law Review) (uses hypotheticals to ‘stress test’ US constitutional requirements that the President should be atleast 35 years of age and serve a four-year term to demonstrate the role purposive interpretation can play, and the role of the common law in resolving future potential disputes).
  5. Pratheepan Gulasekaram, The Borderline Constitution (2026) (identifies and theorizes a distinct constitutional regime that American federal courts have constructed at, adjacent to, and because of, the nation’s border and demonstrates how constitutional guarantees systematically recede in the border’s shadow)

Call for Papers and Announcements:

  1. The University of Coimbra Institute for Legal Research invites attendance to the Conference “Pathways towards Just Urban Transitions” that will be held on 28 April 2026 at Colégio da Trindade, Portugal.
  2. The Lisbon Public Law Research Center invites registration for the the Summer School on Legal Reasoning & Artificial Intelligence that will be held on 18-19 and 22-26 June 2026 at Lisbon School of Law.
  3. The Lisbon Public Law Research Center invites attendance for the Rationalising Obligations Workshop by Andreas Vassiliou, to be held in person and online on 17 April.
  4. The Jean Monnet Network BRIDGE Watch: Values and Democracy in the EU and Latin America invites young researchers (up to 35 years old) to apply for the VI Jean Monnet Prize in Social Sciences, under the theme “The Globalization of EU Values and Democracy”. The deadline for submissions is 1 June 2026.
  5.  The Academy on Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at Washington College of Law is accepting applications to the 2026 Summer Program of Advanced Studies on Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, to be held from May 25 to June 12, 2026. The deadline to apply is 1 May 2026.
  6. The Centre for Research on Law and Hybrid Threats invites papers for the Joint Symposium of the Contemporary Central & East European Law journal and the Centre for Research on Law and Hybrid Threats. The deadline for submissions is 15 June 2026.
  7. The Chair for Human Rights and Migration Law, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg invites papers for a workshop on Absolute Rights under the ECHR at State Borders. The deadline for abstract submission is 10 May 2026.

Elsewhere Online:

  1. Emily Bazelon and David French, Trump Went to the Supreme Court to Make It About Him, The New York Times (3 April 2026)
  2. Aimee Cunningham, Supreme Court ruling on ‘conversion therapy’ puts medical talk in the hot seat, ScienceNews (3 April 2026)
  3. Nora Collins, The inscrutable Chief Justice John Roberts, SCOTUSblog (3 April 2026)
  4. Laurent Pech, Poland’s “Illegal Judges”, Verfassungsblog (2 April 2026)
  5. Editors, How China hopes to win from the war, The Economist (1 April 2026)

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