What’s New in Public Law

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—Eman Muhammad Rashwan, PhD. Candidate in the European Doctorate in Law & Economics (EDLE), Hamburg University, Germany; Assistant Lecturer of Public Law, Cairo University, Egypt.

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 Indian Supreme Court delivered its decision in support of equaling women officers to their male counterparts in the military by making them eligible for permanent commissions, which qualifies them to serve as a full tenure.
2. Thailand’s Constitutional Court held that Article 301 of the country’s criminal code penalizing abortion is unconstitutional. The Court asked the government to amend the law within one calendar year.
3. The Constitutional Court of Thailand dissolved an upstart opposition party which challenged the military establishment for taking an illegal loan from its billionaire founder.
4. The Supreme Court of Estonia ruled that Regulation No 99, of November 29, 2019, which stipulates that the wastewater should be as pure as the water in water bodies is constitutional.

In the News

1. After more than four months after the election of the new parliament, the Tunisian president Kais Saied still struggles with the formation of the new government. The president announced that if the parliament rejects the currently proposed cabinet, he will dissolve the parliament and calls for early elections. On another note, the country has been witnessing a constitutional argument over the parliament authorities versus the current cabinet.
2. The Iraqi Prime Minister-designate Mohammed Tawfiq Allawi announced that he formed a cabinet of political independents and called the parliament to vote on it on February 24. The constitution gives him until March 2 to present a cabinet for parliamentary approval.
3. The autonomous Bougainville government in Papua New Guinea declared lately to amend its constitution to, among other issues, allow the president to serve for more than two terms. The Ombudsman Commission released a statement asking the government to follow the procedures of amending the constitution strictly.
4. The Indonesian government dismissed concerns over a proposed bill to give the president the power to revoke regional regulations. The economic minister said that the president would have this power only over the administrations bellow the central government.
5. Two new judges were appointed at the German Federal Court of Justice. The two judges are Jörn Fritsche and Mario von Häfen who were both judges at High Regional Courts.

New Scholarship

1. Samy A. Ayoub, Law, Empire, and the Sultan: Ottoman Imperial Authority and Late Hanafi Jurisprudence (2019) (examining the Ottoman imperial authority in authoritative Ḥanafī legal works from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries CE)
2. Christian Bjørnskov and Stefan Voigt, Is constitutionalized media freedom only window dressing? Evidence from terrorist attacks, Public Choice (2020) (finding that neither the direct nor indirect constitutional protection of the media freedom mitigates the post-terror curtailment of press freedom)
3. Dominique Dalla-Pozza and Greg Weeks, A Statutory Shield of the Executive: To What Extent Does Legislation Help Administrative Action Evade Judicial Scrutiny?, in Janina Boughey and Lisa Burton Crawford (eds.), Interpreting Executive Power (2020) (explaining the functional justification for the preference of codification of the executive power in Australia)
4. Diego Muro and Ignacio Lago (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Spanish Politics (2020) (presenting a comparative, empirical analysis of Spanish politics, including a chapter on the judicial politics and the Constitutional Court)
5. Judith Resnik, (Un)Constitutional Punishments: Eighth Amendment Silos, Penological Purposes, and People’s “Ruin,” The Yale Law Journal Forum (2020) (contextually examining the US Supreme Court decision in Timbs v. Indiana on the application of the constitutional prohibition of excessive fines to states )

Call for Papers and Announcements

1. Università degli Studi di Milano invites applications for a conference on “Academic Freedom under Pressure? New State and Social Challenges in a German-Italian Comparison,” which will be held on September 24-25, 2020, at the University of Milan under the sponsorship of the German Academic Exchange Service – DAAD. Please note that accepted participants will be reimbursed for travelling and accommodation expenses.
2. The University of Texas Law School invites participants for its conference on “The Imperial Presidency in the Twenty-First Century,” convened by professors Richard Albert and Sanford Levinson. The conference will be held at Texas Law School in Austin, on March 26-28, 2020.
3. The American University, Washington College of Law in Washington DC, seeks an Assistant Director for its Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project.
4. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) invites attendees, online and in persons, for its book event hosting Keith Whittington to discuss his book “Repugnant Laws: Judicial Review of Acts of Congress from the Founding to the Present.” The event will take place on February 21, 2020.
5. The National University of Public Service at Ludovika and the Centre for Parliamentary Studies at the University of Győr invites for a conference on parliamentary and legislative research, under the title “30 Years of Parliaments and Legislation in Central and Eastern Europe.” The deadline for submission of proposals is March 22, 2020.
6. The paper submission period is now open for the 37^th Annual Conference of the European Association of Law and Economics (EALE), which will be held on September 24-25, 2020, at the University of Paris 2. Submissions deadline is on April 6, 2020.
7. The Institute for Advanced Studies in Public Administration (IDHEAP), Faculty of Law, Criminal Sciences and Public Administration of the University of Lausanne, invites young researchers to submit a paper as part of the meeting on the topic “What social sciences can contribute to the study of (public) law,” to be held on May 14–15, 2020, in Lausanne, Switzerland. The deadline for submission of abstracts is March 20, 2020.

Elsewhere Online

1. David R. Cameron, AKK resigns as CDU chair, and Germany and Europe wonder who will lead after Merkel, Yale MacMillan Center
2. Elisa Arcioni & Rayner Thwaites, Aboriginal Australians not Vulnerable to Deportation, IACL-AIDC Blog
3. Kevin Casas-Zamora, The State of Democracy in Africa, International IDEA
4. Jordan S. Rubin, Project Bolsters Tribes’ High Court Claims Following Defeats, Bloomberg Law
5. Hoitsimolimo Mutlokwa, Land Expropriation without Compensation in South Africa, IACL-AIDC Blog
6. Daniel Marans, Embracing Supreme Court Expansion Carries No Political Cost, Study Says, HuffPost
7. Mark Mancini, On the Rule of Law, Blockades, and Indigenous Self-Government, Double Aspect