What’s New in Public Law

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–Neslihan Çetin, PhD Candidate (University Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne)

–Sonder Li, LL.M. (King’s College London)

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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

1. Iran’s supreme court has upheld the death sentence handed down to a Swedish-Iranian dual national convicted of leading an Arab separatist group accused of attacks including one on a military parade in 2018 that killed 25 people.
2. In a landmark ruling, Slovenia’s top court has abrogated a law that required the Slovenian central bank to compensate those who lost their investments during the banking sector bailout of 2013.
3. Bulgaria’s Constitutional Court has rejected an appeal from 50 MPs to rule on the National Assembly’s decision to supply military materiel to Ukraine as inadmissible and closed the case.
4. Turkey’s Constitutional Court ruled to grant the People’s Democratic Party (HDP) more time to present its oral defense in the case to shut down the pro-Kurdish party for alleged ties to terrorism.
5. The Constitutional Court of the Republic of Uzbekistan recognized the submission of the draft Constitutional Law to a referendum as consistent with the Constitution.
6. India’s Supreme Court on Monday said a five-judge bench will start hearing final arguments over granting legal recognition to same-sex marriages on April 18.
7. Justice Anwar Usman, who is also President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s brother-in-law, was reelected on Wednesday by his peers to lead the Constitutional Court for the next five years.
8. The Turkish Constitutional Court has ruled that the right to respect for family life was violated in an application related to the arrested couple not being able to communicate with each other.
9. The Ankara 21st Administrative Court in Turkey has ruled for the reinstatement of five “Academics for Peace” in two separate decisions. More than 2,200 academics were dismissed from their positions after signing a declaration criticizing the government over human rights violations during the 2015-2016 conflict in the country’s Kurdish majority regions.

In the News

1. Iran’s Chief Justice Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei announced pardons, per Article 110 of the Iranian Constitution, for 82,000 individuals, including 22,000 that participated in the protests. The specifics of the charges and pardons were not provided.
2. French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne invoked Article 49.3 of the Constitution to push an unpopular pensions reform bill through the National Assembly without a vote. Citizens and unions are demonstrating and striking, police fired tear gas to disperse crowds.
3. The Georgian Dream ruling party unconditionally withdrew the “foreign agents” bill amidst the consideration of Georgia’s EU candidate status, which is enshrined in the Constitution. The bill required non-government organisations that receive more than 20% of funding abroad to register with Georgia’s Justice Ministry.
4. Ugandan legislators introduced a new anti-homosexuality bill that could jail LGBTQ+ individuals for up to 10 years for declaring their identity or touching with homosexual intentions. This bill is a revised and more egregious version of the 2014 Anti-Homosexuality Act that was struck down by Uganda’s constitutional court on procedural grounds.
5. China’s parliament approved amendments to the Legislation Law, which has a semi-constitutional status. Notably, the Law was amended to grant the approximately 170-member National People’s Congress Standing Committee special powers to pass laws after just one review session and the draft law does not define what constitutes an emergency situation.
6. The UK government passed the second reading of the Illegal Migration Bill, despite Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s admitting that the Bill may be incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights and drawing profound concerns from the UN Refugee Agency.

New Scholarship

1. Armin von Bogdandy, Peter M Huber, and Sabrina Ragone, The Max Planck Handbooks in European Public Law Volume III: Constitutional Foundations (In-depth appraisal of the history and evolution of constitutions of European states, intersections of domestic constitutional identity and European law and identity, compares constitutional foundations, structures and basic principles in the European Legal Space)
2. Cara McClellan, Evading a Race-Conscious Constitution (Analyzing the idea of a “colorblind” Constitution which is front and center in cases before the Supreme Court this term)
3. Danielle Keats Citron, Intimate Privacy in a Post-Roe World (This article builds on the theory of intimate privacy as a civil right and lays out core commitments that lawmakers should adopt to protect intimate privacy)
4. Hafsteinn Dan Kristjánsson, Sebastian Lewis, and Timothy Endicott, Philosophical Foundations of Precedent (The book is the largest-scale contribution to the philosophical investigation of precedent and “focuses on the nature and authority of earlier decisions and the forms of reasoning that precedent involves in common law and civil law systems”)
5. James May, Walter F. Baber, Environmental Human Rights in the Anthropocene, Concepts, Contexts, and Challenges (This book critically analyses the complexities of uniting human rights advocacy and environmental protection)
6. Nurit Wimer, Oran Perez, Algorithmic Constitutionalism (This article develops a different approach to coping with the risks of AI governance, which has been termed “algorithmic constitutionalism”)
7. European Constitutional Law Review, issue 1, Volume 19 is now available.
8. Hong Kong Law Journal Part 3 of the 2022 issue, Volume 52 is now available. A section is dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the Hong Kong Basic Law.
9. Public Law April 2023 issue is now available.
10. The Law & Practice of International Courts and Tribunals, issue 1, Volume 22 is now available.

Calls for Papers and Announcements

1. Enrollment is now open for the 2023 Summer School on Law and Cultural Heritage across the Atlantic: Creative Industries between Law and Heritage, hosted by the IMT School for Advanced Studies on June 12-14 in Lucca, Italy. The application deadline is March 31, 2023.
2. Call for articles: CELS Enviro-Legal Blog invites articles on a rolling basis on contemporary environmental issues. The CELS Enviro-Legal Blog is an egalitarian space that aims to foster critical interdisciplinary research on environmental developments across the world via inviting original contributions by the legal fraternity.
3. Call for Applications to Host the IACL’s 2026 World Congress: The World Congress is the most important of all activities organized by the International Association of Constitutional Law (IACL), held every 4 years to bring together constitutionalists from all regions of the world.
4. Paper proposals are invited for the Fifth Illinois-Bologna conference on Constitutional History: Comparative Perspectives. The conference will be held in Bologna at the Department of Legal Studies of the University of Bologna on September 14-15, 2023.
5. Call for applications: Director of EIN. Since it was established in December 2016, EIN has been at the cutting edge of addressing one of the key challenges to human rights in Europe: the non-implementation of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR).
6. The European Association of Law and Economics (EALE) welcomes submissions for its 40th annual conference on September 21–22, 2023.
7. You can still submit proposals for a themed set of ‘analysis’ papers to be published in the April 2024 issue of the Public Law journal.

Elsewhere Online

1. Aileen Kavanagh, Is the Illegal Migration Act itself illegal? The Meaning and Methods of Section 19 HRA (March 10, 2023)
2. Alon Harrel, The Proposed Constitutional Putsch in Israel (March 14, 2023)
3. Brittan Heller, Daniel Castaño, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Courts, and Real Harms (March 14, 2023)
4. César Landa, The Political Crisis in Peru: Is There a Constitutional Solution? (March 14, 2023)
5. Dacian C. Dragos, The indirect review of administrative action in Romania: the triumph of legality over legal certainty (March 14, 2023)
6. Jeremy Letwin, The Bill of Rights Bill and the Modern Mirror Principle (March 14, 2023)
7. John Elwood, What to do with the abortion case on the Supreme Court’s docket? (March 16, 2023)
8. Patrick Hulme, A Not-So-Imperial Presidency (March 10, 2023)
9. Raza Husain, Richard Hermer, and Sile Reynolds, An Unlawful Act – Braverman’s Illegal Migration Bill (March 15, 2023)