—Claudia Marchese, Research Fellow in Comparative Public Law at the University of Sassari (Italy)
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 iconnecteditors@gmail.com.
Developments in Constitutional Courts
- Italy’s Constitutional Court ruled that children should not automatically be given the surname of their father. The court said that a child should instead have the surnames of both parents, except in the case they agree on one surname.
- On 11 May 2022, Colombia’s Constitutional Court ruled by 6 votes to 3 to decriminalize medically assisted suicide.
- South Korea’s Constitutional Court ruled that the lawyers’ code of conduct banning them from joining online legal counseling platforms is unconstitutional.
- German Federal Constitutional Court ruled that it is not unconstitutional the absence of differential contribution rates between parents and childless people for mandatory contributions to public health insurance and public pension. By contrast, it is unconstitutional that the number of children is not taken into account in contributions to long-term care insurance.
- The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in two Arizona death penalty cases that 1990s amendments to the federal habeas corpus law permit state prisoners who were provided ineffective representation at trial and in post-conviction proceedings to argue that their counsel were ineffective, but bar them from presenting evidence of this ineffectiveness once the case had reached federal court.
- The Turkish Constitutional Court in the decision n. 2017/39464, published in the Official Gazette on 27 April 2022, evaluated the freedom of expression of public personnel stating that it is legitimate for the state to impose duties and responsibilities on public personnel, including the duty of royalty. The Constitutional Court further stated that similar duties do not eliminate the freedom of expression considering that public personnel can make criticisms, provided that their expressions are balanced and objective.
In the News
- On 29 May 2022 presidential election will take place in Colombia.
- The lower house of Poland’s parliament, the Sejm, has approved legislation to abolish the disciplinary chamber for judges, one of the European Commission’s central demands to unlock billions of euros of funds frozen over rule-of-law concerns.
- On 26 May 2022, U.S. Senate Republicans blocked a bill designed to combat domestic terrorism.
- From 23 to 27 May, a delegation from the European Parliament’s Internal Market Committee visited the company headquarters of Meta, Google, Apple and others, in Silicon Valley to discuss in person the Digital Services Act package, and other digital legislation, and hear the position of American companies, start-ups, academia and government officials.
- On 19 May 2022, the European Parliament adopted its review of the Commission’s 2021 annual Rule of Law Report with 429 votes for, 131 against and 34 abstentions.
New Scholarship
- Dominique Custos, American federalism and the test of the covid-19: a window into its strengths and weaknesses / Le fédéralisme états-unien à l’épreuve du covid-19: un miroir sur ses forces et faiblesses, Confluence des Droits-La Revue, 2022 (showing that neither federalism in general nor dualistic federalism in particular is fatally dysfunctional when facing the test of a pandemic)
- Mark Findlay, Jolyon Ford, Josephine Seah, Dilan Thampapillai (eds.), Regulatory Insights on Artificial Intelligence (2022) (investigating the relationship between law and artificial intelligence governance, and the need for new and innovative approaches to regulating AI and big data).
- David Schultz, Constitutional Precedent in US Supreme Court Reasoning (2022) (examining the role of constitutional precedent in U.S. Supreme Court reasoning).
- Francois Venter, The Language of Constitutional Comparison (2022) (exploring the problems related to terminological hegemony in comparative law).
- Mohammad Ibrahim, The judicialisation of discrimination in the Indonesian constitutional court (2022) (seeking to determine the extent to which the Indonesian Constitutional Court has protected the citizens’ fundamental rights of equality and against discrimination).
Calls for Papers and Announcements
- The yearly “Federal Scholar in Residence Programme” welcomes both academics and practitioners to the Institute for Comparative Federalism at Eurac Research in Bolzano (Italy). The winner of each year’s programme is granted a research residency of up to 3 weeks at the research center. Applications are to be sent directly to the program manager by 1 July 2022.
- The Italian-Spanish seminar of constitutional studies invites young scholars to submit papers for the sixth edition of the colloquium that will be held in Granada in October 2022. A call for papers has been launched and will close on 5 June 2022.
- Universidad de La Sabana (Colombia) offers a course on the Trial of Jesus led by Professor Joseph Weiler. In this seminar, students will analyze the significance of this trial from legal, political and theological perspectives. The seminar will be held entirely on MS Teams and will be taught in Spanish from 7 to 24 June 2022.
- The International Association of Constitutional Law (IACL), in cooperation with the Union of Turkish Bar Associations (TBB), invites submissions for the roundtable on “Environment, Climate Change and Constitutionalism” that will be held in Ankara on 20-21 October 2022. Interested scholars are invited to submit a CV and an abstract no longer than 500 words by 1 July 2022.
- The deadline to present an abstract for the international scientific conference: “Freedom of Religion or Belief in Times of Migration” (6-7 October 2022, Modena, Italy) has been extended to 15 June 2022. The conference is organized by the Observatory on Religious Freedom in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ORFECT) together with the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia.
Elsewhere Online
- Johannes Buchheim, Gilad Abiri, The War in Ukraine, Fake News, and the Digital Epistemic Divide, Verfassungsblog
- Renáta Uitz, Illiberals of the World Unite in Budapest – Yet Again, Verfassungsblog
- Janine Prantl, Ian Matthew Kysel, Generous, but Equal Treatment? Anti-Discrimination Duties of States Hosting Refugees Fleeing Ukraine, EJIL Talk
- Aoife Nolan, The Children are the Future – Or Not? Exploring The Complexities of the Relationship between the Rights of Children and Future Generations, EJIL Talk
- Vedran Dzihic, Paul Schmidt, The Russia-Ukraine war must be the impetus for a new EU enlargement and neighbourhood policy, LSE blog
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