What’s New in Public Law

—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 Caribbean Court of Justice found that the appointment of Justice James Patterson as the Chairman of the Guyana Elections Commission almost two years ago was unconstitutional.
2. The Caribbean Court of Justice confirmed the validity of a no-confidence motion against the ruling party in Guyana.
3. The European Court of Justice found that a German law instituting a highway toll violated European Union law because the law discriminated based on nationality.
4. The Constitutional Court of Ukraine ruled that President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s move to dissolve the Parliament was constitutional.
5. The Constitutional Court of Ecuador ruled against a request to require community consultations for a planned mining project.
6. The US Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision in favour of a ban on uranium mining in Virginia.
7. The US Supreme Court ruled against the Virginia House of Delegates in a racial gerrymandering case.
8. The US Supreme Court ruled that a public access television provider is not a state actor.
9. The US Supreme Court ruled that a Mississippi prosecutor unconstitutionally excluded black jurors from a murder trial.
10. The US Supreme Court upheld the federal government’s authority under a 2006 law to require thousands of sex offenders to register with authorities in the states where they live.
11. The Constitutional Court of Russia ruled that local authorities may not ban public events by simply citing lack of security plan from organizers.

In the News

1. Advocate General of the Court of Justice of the EU, Evgeni Tanchev advised the Court to rule that the new retirement rules for Polish judges are contrary to EU law.
2. The Union Parliament’s Charter Amendment Committee of Myanmar completed reviewing the entire Constitution for possible amendments and will send a report to the Parliament.
3. The New York state legislature passed a bill prohibiting citizens of the state from refusing vaccinations on religious grounds.
4. Indian Prime Minister proposed constitutional amendments to hold simultaneous elections to Lok Sabha and state assemblies.
5. The President of Mexico proposed holding a recall referendum on his presidency on March 21, 2021, at the latest.
6. Pakistan will establish a system of 1,016 special courts dedicated to addressing gender-based violence.
7. The Court of Appeals of the United Kingdom found that the government in 2016 illegally sold arms to Saudi Arabia.
8. The date for a referendum on whether or not to extend the vote in presidential elections to Irish citizens living abroad was set for October.
9. The Supreme Court of Colorado found that an initiative to repeal the Taxpayer Bill of Rights (“TABOR”) is a single subject that can be voted on in one referendum.

New Scholarship

1. Tom Ginsburg, Mark D Rosen, and Georg Vanberg (eds), Constitutions in Times of Financial Crisis (2019) (assessing the ability of constitutional orders all over the world to cope with financial crises, and the demands for emergency powers that typically accompany them)
2. Bui Ngoc Son, Economic Constitution of the Developing World, Law and Development Review (introducing a direct concept of the economic constitution with reference to developing countries)
3. Bruce Ackerman, Revolutionary Constitutions: Charismatic Leadership and the Rule of Law (2019) (offering insights into the origins, successes, and threats to revolutionary constitutionalism in case studies of India, South Africa, Italy, France, Poland, Burma, Israel, Iran, and the US)
4. Sanford Levinson and Jack M Balkin, Democracy and Dysfunction (2019) (uncovering the underlying causes of the current crisis of American political life and their meaning for democracy)
5. Neliana Rodean, ‘We, the People’ Entitlement Within Constitutional Change (2019) (examining the “we the people” claims in constitutional change)
6. Ling Li, Political-Legal Order and the Curious Double Character of China’s Courts, 6 Asian Journal of Law and Society (2019) (providing an analytical account of how politics and law in China are organically integrated into the institutional architecture of courts as designed by the Chinese Communist Party)
7. Simon Butt, Judicial Reasoning and Review in the Indonesian Supreme Court, 6 Asian Journal of Law and Society (2019) (describing and criticizing the judicial reasoning of Indonesia’s Supreme Court, through the lens of the Court’s reviews of subnational laws during 2011–17)
8. Cedric Jenart and Mathieu Leloup, Separation of Powers and Alternative Dispute Resolution before the European Court of Human Rights, European Constitutional Law Review (2019) (examining how alternative dispute resolution procedures before the ECtHR impact the separation of powers principle in the contracting states of the Council of Europe)
9. Alec Stone Sweet and Jud Mathews, Proportionality Balancing and Constitutional Governance A Comparative and Global Approach (2019) (examining the law and politics of rights protection in democracies, and in human rights regimes in Europe, the Americas, and Africa)
10. Philip Alston and Nikki Reisch (eds), Tax, Inequality, and Human Rights (2019) (showing how structural biases in the tax regime impact human rights)
11. Arghya Sengupta, Independence and Accountability of the Higher Indian Judiciary (2019) (examining who the judges of the Supreme Court of India are, how they are appointed, transferred and removed, and what they do after retirement)
12. Vito Breda (ed), Legal Transplants in East Asia and Oceania (2019) (providing an overview of methodologies that are conducive to a successful legal transplant in East Asia and Oceania)
13. Abdurrachman Satrio, A Battle Between Two Populists: The 2019 Presidential Election and the Resurgence of Indonesia’s Authoritarian Constitutional Tradition, 19 Australian Journal of Asian Law (2019) (examining the emergence of two major populist candidates with authoritarian tendencies in presidential elections in a country once hailed as the most stable democracy in Southeast Asia)

Call for Papers and Announcements

1. The University of Perugia invites panels and paper proposals for the 2019 Critical Legal Conference that will take place on September 12-14, 2019. The deadline for submission of abstracts is July 15, 2019.
2. The Gujarat National Law University Law and Society Review (GLSR) invites submissions for its second volume in 2019. The deadline for submissions is August 4, 2019.
3. RECONNECT organizes a webinar on “Poland’s Constitutional Breakdown,” a new book by Wojciech Sadurski, to be held on June 25, 2019. You can register for the webinar at this link.
4. Yale Law School invites submissions from PhD candidates and recent graduates from doctoral programs for its Ninth Annual Doctoral Scholarship Conference to be held on November 8-9, 2019. The workshop has four thematic workshops: 1) International Law; 2) Law and Philosophy; 3) Network Theory, Law and Policy; and 4) Public Law and Institutional Design: Assemblies, Executives, Courts, Agencies. The deadline for submissions of abstracts is July 8, 2019.
5. The Law Faculty at Lund University invites applications for the position of a professor in international law and human rights. The deadline for applications is September 12, 2019.
6. The International Journal of Law in Context and the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies (CSLS) at the University of Oxford jointly invite early career scholars to participate in a workshop to be held in Oxford, on September 17-18, 2019. The purpose of this international to support junior researchers in developing research projects and preparing their publications for submission to scholarly journals in the field of socio-legal studies. The deadline for applications is 10 July 2019.
7. The Centre for Advanced Studies in Biomedical Innovation Law (CeBIL), at the Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen invites applications for two doctoral candidates. The closing date for applications is July 15, 2019.

Elsewhere Online

1. Martin Husovec, Why There Is No Due Process Online?, Balkinization
2. Ann Southworth, The Power of Constitutional Frames, Balkinization
3. Noah Feldman, Congress’s Weakness on Tariffs Is Its Own Fault, Bloomberg Opinion
4. David R Cameron, Tory MPs narrow choice of new party leader to Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt, Yale MacMillan Center
5. Shubhangi Agarwalla, Decisional Autonomy as Central to Privacy: Reproductive Rights in India, IACL-AIDC Blog
6. Arushi Gupta, Notes from a Foreign Field – Carpenter v USA and Rethinking the Third-Party Doctrine in the Digital Age, Indian Constitutional Law and Philosophy
7. Wessel Reijers, How to Make the Perfect Citizen?, Verfassungsblog
8. Albert Chen, A Commentary on the Fugitive Offenders and Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Legislation (Amendment) Bill 2019, HKU Legal Scholarship Blog
9. Pierre de Vos, A brilliant court victory for LGBT people in Botswana lays the ground for further legal activism, Constitutionally Speaking
10. Tony Wright, Joni Lovenduski, Andrew Gamble and Albert Weale, Rethinking democracy: is our democracy fit for purpose?, The Constitution Unit