What’s New in Comparative Public Law

–Patrick Yingling, Reed Smith LLP

In this weekly feature, I-CONnect publishes a curated reading list of developments in comparative 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 comparative public law blogosphere.

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

Developments in Constitutional Courts

1. The Moldovan Constitutional Court ruled in favor of having direct national elections to choose a president rather than a vote in parliament.
2. Central African Republic’s constitutional court confirmed that former mathematics professor Faustin-Archange Touadera has been elected president.
3. The U.S. Supreme Court temporarily blocked a Louisiana abortion law that would require abortion doctors to have admitting privileges in a nearby hospital and significant surgical upgrades to abortion centers.
4. The Constitutional Court of South Africa rejected Oscar Pistorius’s last-ditch attempt to appeal his murder conviction.
5. The German Constitutional Court began hearings to decide whether to ban the far-right National Democratic Party.

In the News

1. China’s foreign minister stated that Taiwan’s president-elect Tsai Ing-wen must respect the island’s own constitution that states Taiwan and the mainland are both part of one China.
2. The Central Committee of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party decided to extend support to the proposal of establishing a Constitutional Council.
3. The Bahamian Parliament passed four amendments to the country’s 1973 independence constitution, effectively removing the remaining vestiges of discrimination against all Bahamians from the country’s Supreme Law.
4. Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu stated that there will be no bargaining over a new constitution that could enhance the powers of the president.
5. A new law in China will provide penalties for domestic abuse and people will be allowed to go to court to obtain restraining orders.

New Scholarship

1. Research Handbook on Global Administrative Law (Sabino Cassese ed.) (forthcoming 2016) (exploring the main themes and topics of the emerging field of Global Administrative Law with contributions by leading scholars and experts from universities and organizations around the world)
2. Mark S. Brodin, The British Experience with Hearsay Reform: A Cautionary Tale, 84 Fordham Law Review (2016) (exploring the British experience with the Civil Evidence Act of 1995 and the Criminal Justice Act of 2003, which significantly reform the common law treatment of hearsay and substitute a discretionary approach to admission)
3. Dmitriy Kamensky, Introducing Corporate Criminal Liability in Ukraine: Terra Incognita (2016) (using the American corporate criminal liability as a model to analyze the advantages and flaws of corporate criminal liability in Ukraine)
4. Darryl K. Brown, Free Market Criminal Justice: How Democracy and Laissez Faire Undermine the Rule of Law, Virginia Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper No. 26 (2016) (making the case that faith in democratic politics and free markets has undermined the rule of law in U.S. criminal process)
5. Charles G. Ngwena, Taking Women’s Rights Seriously: Using Human Rights to Require State Implementation of Domestic Abortion Laws in African Countries with Reference to Uganda, 60 Journal of African Law 110 (2016) (developing a normative human rights framework for imposing on a state the obligation to take positive steps to implement abortion laws that the state itself has adopted)
6. Anneli Albi, Erosion of Constitutional Rights in EU Law: A Call for “Substantive Co-Operative Constitutionalism” Part 1, 9 Vienna Journal of International Constitutional Law 151 (2015) (positing an emergence at the EU level of measures which, if attempted at a national level without the constraints of EU law, would, in a significant number of national legal orders, prompt constitutional courts to voice serious concerns about core European constitutional values)
7. Anneli Albi, Erosion of Constitutional Rights in EU Law: A Call for “Substantive Co-Operative Constitutionalism” Part 2, 9 Vienna Journal of International Constitutional Law 291 (2015) (propounding the concept of “substantive co-operative constitutionalism” and exploring how European constitutional law and the European constitutional law discourse could be recalibrated towards a greater responsiveness to substantive constitutional values)
8. Koen De Roo, Directors’ Fiduciary Duties Beyond the Nation State, Ars Aequi (forthcoming 2016) (discussing national debates on such approaches in the U.S. (Delaware) and the Netherlands and contrasting those with the emerging sphere of transnational corporate governance)
9. Albert Sanchez-Graells, Exclusion of Economic Operators from Public Procurement Procedures. A Comparative View on Selected Jurisdictions, in Burgi & M. Trybus (eds.), Qualification, Exclusion and Selection in EU Procurements, volume 7 (forthcoming 2016) (taking a comparative view on the rules applicable to the exclusion of economic operators from public procurement procedures covered by the EU rules)
10. David N. Cassuto and Cayleigh S. Eckhardt, Don’t Be Cruel (Anymore): A Look at the Animal Cruelty Regimes of the United States and Brazil with a Call for a New Animal Welfare Agency, 43 Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review 1 (2016) (offering a comparative analysis of the agricultural animal welfare regimes of two countries with globally significant presence in the agriculture industry: the United States and Brazil

Calls for Papers and Announcements

1. Organizers at Rutgers Law School, the London School of Economics Department of Law, and the Rutgers Institute for Law and Philosophy have issued a call for abstracts and papers for a conference on “Theorizing Criminal Law Reform” at Rutgers Law School in Newark, New Jersey on April 21-22, 2017.
2. The Louisiana Law Review, the Center of Civil Law Studies, and the Paul M. Hebert Law Center have organized a symposium titled “More than a Tradition: The Future of the Civil Law in Louisiana and Abroad” in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on March 18, 2016.
3. INTRAlaw (International and Transnational Tendencies in Law) has issued a call for abstracts for an academic workshop on the theme of “Interaction between human rights: 50 years of the Covenants” at Aarhus University in Denmark on September 29-30, 2016.
4. The International Association of Labour Law Journals has announced a call for papers for the 2016 Marco Biagi Award. The call requests papers from doctoral students, advanced professional students, and academic researchers in the early stage of their careers concerning comparative and/or international labour or employment law and employment relations.
5. Emory Law’s Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative and the Centre for Law and Social Justice at the University of Leeds School of Law have issued a call for paper proposals for a Workshop on Vulnerability and Social Justice on June 17-18, 2016, in Leeds, United Kingdom.

Elsewhere Online

1. Cristiano d’Orsi, The idea of an African passport and the freedom of movement of persons in the continent: Only wishful thinking?, AfricLaw
2. Rogendy Toussaint, The Failure of Illicit Asset Recovery: A Haitian Case Study, Jurist
3. Robert Thomas, Local Government Devolution in England, UK Constitutional Law Blog
4. György Schöpflin, EU Law and Politics: the Rule of Law Framework, Verfassungsblog
5. Te-Ping Chin, Slaying of Beijing Judge Prompts Horror in China’s Embattled Legal Community, Wall Street Journal Law Blog