What’s New in Public Law

—Sandeep Suresh, Faculty Member, Jindal Global Law School, India

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 Supreme Court of Canada upheld the current military justice system in the country that does not follow the jury trial system for accused military officials.
2. The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom will have three new justices and new President of the Court.
3. The Constitutional Court of Ecuador legalized same-sex marriages.
4. The Supreme Court of Norway held that in civil cases, orders to produce digital documents should be solely for relevant evidence, and the cost of producing it must be proportional to the value of the dispute.
5. The Court of Appeal of Vanuatu held that a national referendum must validate constitutional amendment regarding Parliamentary Secretaries as such changes affect the structure of the parliamentary system. 

In the News

1. The Parliament of India amended the Right to Information Act, 2005 to authorize the Central Government to regulate the tenure and salaries of information commissioners; a move that potentially curtails their independence and consequently tarnishes the citizen’s fundamental right to information.
2. The European Commission referred Hungary’s infamous “Stop Soros” law that criminalized any form of support to asylum seekers to the European Court of Justice on the ground that it violates the Union’s Fundamental Rights Charter.
3. The Parliament of Tunisia failed for the seventh time last week to elect members of the country’s Constitutional Court.
4. A District Judge in San Francisco provisionally stayed the latest policy of Donald Trump’s administration that barred migrants from requesting asylum at the US-Mexico border.
5. The Senate of the Parliament of the Czech Republic approved a lawsuit against President Milos Zeman over his repeated gross breaches of the Constitution. Before the suit can be filed in the Constitutional Court, three-fifths of members in the lower house of the Parliament must approve the same.

New Scholarship

1. Brandon L. Garrett, Federal Criminal Risk Assessment, Cardozo Law Review (forthcoming 2019) (arguing for the introduction and consistent use of risk assessment instruments in the federal criminal justice system in the US).
2. Chinmayi Arun, Making Choices: Social Media Platforms and Freedom of Expression Norms, in Lee Bollinger & Agnes Callamard (eds.), Regardless of Frontiers? Freedom of expression and information in the 21st century (forthcoming 2019) (discussing the role and influence of social media companies in creating norms affecting freedom of expression).
3. Dylan Lino, Are Human Rights Enough (in Australia)?, 41 Sydney Law Review (2019) (reviewing Samuel Moyn’s recent book “Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World” and exploring its resonance with Australian political experience).
4. Stephen Skinner, Lethal Force, the Right to Life and the ECHR: Narratives of Death and Democracy (2019) (examining connections between the right to life and the concept of democratic society in the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights on the use of lethal and potentially lethal force in domestic policing and law enforcement operations).
5. Stephen Skinner (ed.), Ideology and Criminal Law: Fascist, National Socialist and Authoritarian Regimes (2019) (examining ideological dimensions of criminal law in anti-democratic regimes of the twentieth century, including Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Nazi-occupied Norway, Franco’s Spain, apartheid South Africa, and authoritarian Brazil, Japan and Romania).
6. Vagda Galhotra, A Case for Legislative Impact Assessment, 54 Economic & Political Weekly (2019) (explaining the need for institutionalizing a uniform framework for the assessment of the impact of laws both before and after their enactment).

Call for Papers and Announcements

1. Nominations are welcome for the Mark Tushnet Prize in Comparative Law, presented to an early-career scholar. Details are available here. The deadline is August 1, 2019.
2. The International Forum on the Future of Constitutionalism invites submissions for its conference on “Constitution-Making and Constitutional Change” to be held at the University of Texas Law School on January 17-18, 2020. More details are available here.
3. The Younger Comparativists Committee (YCC) of the American Society of Comparative Law (ASCL) solicits nominations, including self-nominations, for the annual Richard M. Buxbaum Prize for Teaching in Comparative Law. Early stage scholars in a tenure-track position at an ASCL Member Institution are eligible to apply.
4. The Younger Comparativist’s Committee of the American Society of Comparative Law (ASCL YCC) invites paper submissions from emerging scholars for a panel at the ASCL’s annual meeting to be held at the University of Missouri Law School in Columbia, Missouri, on October 17-19, 2019. The deadline for submissions is August 10, 2019.
5. The University of Ottawa, University of Melbourne, and University of Cambridge invite submissions for the 4th Biennial Public Law Conference on “Public Law: Rights, Duties and Powers.” The conference will be held from June 17-19, 2020, in Ottawa. Interested scholars must send abstracts of their papers by September 2, 2019, to droitpubliclaw@uottawa.ca.
6. The Federal Bar Association and the District of Columbia Bar host the 6th International Conference on “Legislation and Law Reform” from November 14-15, 2019, in Washington D.C. The conference focuses on how laws are written in the United States and around the world at the international, national, and subnational levels. Interested participants must register for the conference at the earliest.
7. The African Network of Constitutional Lawyers invites submissions for its Biennial Conference on “The Paradox of Constitutionalism in Africa: Reflecting on 10 years of the Kenyan Constitution.” The event will be held from August 27-29, 2020, in Nairobi. Interested scholars must submit abstracts of their papers by July 31, 2019, to ancl.radc@gmail.com.
8. The Association of American Law Schools’ Section on European Law invites submissions for the works-in-progress panel at the Annual Meeting of the Association on January 2-5, 2020, in Washington D.C. Papers must relate to European Law and Comparative Law. Interested scholars must submit abstracts of their papers by August 1, 2019.
9. The Asian Journal of Comparative Law invites submissions for its 2019 and 2020 issues. The journal, published by Cambridge University Press, focuses on works that are theoretical, empirical, socio-legal, doctrinal or comparative works that relate to one or more Asian legal systems, as well as work that compares one or more Asian legal systems with non-Asian systems.

Elsewhere Online

1. David R. Cameron, Zelensky’s party wins in a landslide in Ukraine parliamentary election, Yale MacMillan Center
2. Matthias Hartwig, Strengthening the President – Betraying Maidan?: Ukraine’s Constitutional Court Decision on the Premature Dissolution of the Ukrainian Parliament, Verfassungsblog
3. Gautam Bhatia, The judicial presumption of non-citizenship, The Hindu
4. Solomon T. Ebobrah, State, Law and Sexual Orientation in Africa: A peep into the judgment of the Kenyan High Court, Opinio Juris
5. Working People’s Charter, Craftily Written Labour Codes Exclude Millions, Pay Little Heed to Equality, The Wire
6. Tom Spencer, The Sovereignty of Parliament, the Rule of Law, and the High Court of Parliament, UK Constitutional Law Blog