What’s New in Public Law

Developments in Constitutional Courts

1. France’s Constitutional Council ruled that the French public trust register is unconstitutional because the public access disregards the right to privacy.
2. Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal held that key rules allowing the most dangerous criminals to be detained in a special facility after serving a jail sentence are constitutional.
3. Bulgaria’s Constitutional Court clarified the respective roles of incumbent President Rossen Plevneliev and President-Elect Roumen Radev after the resignation of the Boiko Borissov government.
4. France’s Constitutional Council ruled that the “justice 21” law, which introduced contractual non-judicial divorce, is constitutional.
5. Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court held that it cannot hear a case over Internet royalties to news content creators brought by Yahoo, Inc.
6. Kuwait’s Constitutional Court accepted a petition calling for scrapping the November 26 general elections on the basis that the Amiri decree dissolving the National Assembly was not in line with the constitution.

In the News

1. Slovenia amended its constitution to make access to drinkable water a fundamental right for all citizens and stop it from being commercialised.
2. Canada plans to restore voting rights for long-term expats.
3. Hungary’s Parliament elected four Constitutional Court judges to fill vacant positions, and a new court head.
4. The European Parliament voted to halt EU accession negotiations with Turkey due to the government’s “disproportionate repressive measures” after a failed coup in July.
5. A Rome (Italy) court rejected an appeal against the wording of a December 4 referendum on constitutional reform, bringing to an end a series of legal appeals against the vote, all of which have been rejected.
6. Switzerland voted by referendum against plans to abandon nuclear power.

New Scholarship

1. Richard Albert, Constitutional Dismemberment, Boston College Law School Legal Studies Research Paper No. 424 (2016) (introducing and theorizing the phenomenon, concept, doctrine and theory of constitutional dismemberment, a type of constitutional change situated between an amendment and a new constitution)
2. Michaela Hailbronner, Overcoming obstacles to North-South dialogue: Transformative constitutionalism and the fight against poverty and institutional failure, Verfassung und Recht in Übersee VRÜ (2016) (showing that the Global South and transformative constitutionalism has become a prominent topic in comparative constitutional law and arguing that its celebration as a distinctively Southern model risks foreclosing debate with the North/West, whose supposedly more traditional liberal model of constitutionalism is treated as an unappealing counterpoint by Southern scholars)
3. Brian Christopher Jones and Austin Sarat, Justices as ‘Sacred Symbols’: Antonin Scalia and the Cultural Life of the Law, British Journal of American Legal Studies (forthcoming) (examining Justice Scalia’s rise to prominence and his influential status in American law)
4. Malte Kramme, Christian Baldus, Martin Schmidt-Kessel, Brexit und die juristischen Folgen (2017) (discussing the effects Brexit will have on European private and economic law) (in German)
5. Yaniv Roznai, Unconstitutional Constitutional Amendments, The Limits of Amendment Powers (2017) (providing an in-depth analysis of the doctrine of unconstitutional constitutional amendment and its growing role in modern constitutional law and proposing a theoretical framework for constitutional unamendability and its judicial enforcement) (For a 30% Discount, use the code ALAUTHC4)
6. Andreas J. Wiesand, Kalliopi Chainoglou and Anna Sledzinska-Simon (eds.) in collaboration with Yvonne Donders, Culture and Human Rights: The Wroclaw Commentaries (2016) (a legal compendium on human rights in the wider domain of culture, written by 95 experts who summarize and comment on core messages of legal instruments, the essence of case-law, as well as prevailing and important dissenting opinions in the literature, with the aim of providing a user-friendly tool for the daily needs of decision or law-makers)

Calls for Papers and Announcements

1. The University of Portsmouth, School of Law has issued a call for papers for the 52th Annual Conference of the Association of Law Teachers to be held on April 10-11, 2017. The Conference theme is “Foundations and Futures.”
2. The Irish Postgraduate Criminology Conference has issued a call for papers for its third annual conference to be held at the Waterford Institute of Technology on February 23, 2017.
3. Windsor Law has issued a call for papers for the Transnational Law and Justice Network Conference on “Transnational Criminal Law in the Americas” to be held on May 4-5, 2017 at the University of Windsor, Faculty of Law in Windsor, Ontario, Canada.
4. The Center of Advanced Studies in Law and Economics (CASLE), Ghent University, School of Law has issued a call for papers for its Midterm Meeting of the European Master in Law and Economics Program to be held in Ghent, Belgium on February 16-18, 2017.
5. The Penn State Journal of Law & International Affairs has issued a call for papers for an upcoming publication in spring 2017 that will focus on areas of taxation, corporate law, banking and finance, and related subject areas.
6. The European Society of International Law (ESIL) has issued a call for papers for its 13th annual conference to be held in Naples, Italy on September 7-9, 2017.
7. The Commonwealth Journal of Constitutional Law and Public Policy (CJCLPP) has issued a call for papers for its upcoming issue: Volume 3, Issue 1.
8. Constitution Building Programme of the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA) has issued a call for papers for a workshop on “Constitutional Responses to the Crisis of Representation and Oligarchic Democracy” to be in held in the Netherlands in 2017.
9. The Younger Comparativists Committee of the American Society of Comparative Law (YCC) has issued a call for submissions for the Phanor J. Eder LL.B./J.D. Prize in Comparative Law, in connection with its Sixth Annual Conference, to be held on April 28-29, 2017, at Koç University Law School in Istanbul, Turkey.

Elsewhere Online

1. Linda Greenhouse, Chasing Abortion Rights Across the State Line, The New York Times
2. Jean-Philippe Derosier, En Italie : « Basta un sì! », La constitution décodée
3. Jody H. Lehrer, The Most Significant Gain from Cannabis Legalization: One Lawyer’s Perspective, Jurist
4. Derek O’Brien, Grenada’s Constitutional reforms: Referendums and limits to progressive reforms (Part I) and (Part II), ConstitutionNet
5. Ilya Somin, Federalism, the Constitution, and sanctuary cities, The Washington Post