What’s New in Public Law

---

—Azeem Amedi, LLM in Legal and Political Theory, University of York

—Guy Baldwin, PhD Candidate, University of Cambridge

---

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. The US Supreme Court found that the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to the US Constitution prohibits Colorado from forcing a website designer under non-discrimination law to create a website for a same-sex wedding.
2. The Guatemalan Constitutional Court suspended notification of first round presidential election results pending a review of the voting.
3. The US Supreme Court struck down President Joe Biden’s student loan relief program on the basis of a lack of statutory authorization.
4. The Australian High Court dismissed an application for interlocutory relief brought by Russia against the termination of a lease held by the Russian government in Canberra for a new embassy complex.
5. The European Court of Human Rights found that the use of facial recognition technology to identify, locate and arrest a peaceful protestor was in violation of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
6. The Second Senate of the German Federal Constitutional Court held that some provisions of the Bavarian Prison Act and the Prison Act of North-Rhine Westphalia on remuneration of prisoners do not meet the constitutional requirements.
7. The Indonesian Constitutional Court retained the open proportional electoral system for future elections.

In the News

1. Brazil’s Supreme Electoral Court prohibited Jair Bolsonaro from running for office again for eight years.
2. A bill to amend Australia’s Constitution to establish an Indigenous Voice (consultation body) passed both Houses of the Commonwealth Parliament, paving the way for a referendum later in 2023.
3. A US federal judge issued an injunction restricting some federal government officials from communicating with social media companies on the basis of the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.
4. A UK court ruled that the government’s plan to remove asylum seekers to Rwanda was unlawful.
5. The Japanese Diet passed a bill to raise public understanding of LGBT issues.
6. Ghanaian ‘Queen Mothers’ petitioned a constitutional review to include the group in the National House of Chiefs.
7. Draconian provisions in Indonesia’s Law on Electronic Information and Transactions (ITE) are still in deliberation to be amended, to avoid abusive exercises.

New Scholarship

1. Aileen Kavanagh, The Collaborative Constitution (offering a fresh account of how to protect rights in a democracy that departs from accounts which present courts and legislature as rivals for constitutional supremacy)
2. Saskia Stucki, Animal Welfare Law and the Need for an Animal Law of Peace: A Comparative Reconstruction (putting forward a novel analogy between animal welfare law and international humanitarian law)
3. Sam Guy, Mobilising the Market: An Empirical Analysis of Crowdfunding for Judicial Review Litigation (analysing crowdfunding campaigns raising funds for judicial review cases, drawing attention to divergent rates of funding)
4. Guy Baldwin, Same-Sex Marriage in Japan and the Role of Courts in a Dominant Party System (questioning whether judicial deference on the question of the constitutionality of Japan’s failure to provide for same-sex marriage makes sense in a dominant party system)
5. Alison L Young, Unchecked Power? How Recent Constitutional Reforms Are Threatening UK Democracy (providing a consolidated account of changes to the UK constitution that risk it collapsing into a system of unchecked power)
6. Amal Sethi, Looking Beyond the Constituent Power Theory: The Theory of Equitable Elite Bargaining (suggesting an alternative to the constituent power theory for assessing the normative legitimacy of constitution making based on equitable bargaining between elites from most major political groups)
7. Gabrielle Appleby and Erin F Delaney, Judicial Legitimacy and Federal Judicial Design: Managing Integrity and Autochthony (exploring considerations at stake in constructing a federation’s judicial architecture through case studies drawn from the United States, Australia and Canada)
8. Dimitrios Kyritsis, Law in the Service of Legitimacy (discussing about law’s contribution to political legitimacy of a government, departing from Ronald Dworkin’s perspective, on the assurance of regimes to behave according to law and morality)

Calls for Papers and Announcements

1. Dnipro Humanitarian University, St Mary’s University and University of Westminster Conference on “Legal Challenges of the Globalised World – How should the law protect and realise rights?” will be held online on 12 October 2023. The deadline for submissions is 24 July 2023.
2. The Younger Comparativists Committee (YCC) of the American Society of Comparative Law (ASCL) is inviting submissions for its Twelfth Annual Conference, to be held in-person in conjunction with the ASCL Annual Meeting on 26-28 October 2023, at the Florida International University College of Law. The deadline for submissions is 1 August 2023.
3. The University of Virginia School of Law will hold a symposium on Judicial Rhetoric on 5 April 2024. The deadline for submissions is 15 September 2023.
4. The 2024 Telos-Paul Piccone Institute Annual Conference on “Democracy Today” will take place at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute at Queens College/CUNY, New York, on 22-23 March 2024. The deadline for submissions is 15 October 2023.
5. The Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, University of Oslo, is hosting a webinar/seminar on global constitutionalism, international adjudicative bodies, and hegemony on 16-17 November 2023. The deadline for submissions is 21 August 2023.

Elsewhere Online

1. Jack Balkin, Constitutional Ideology (2 July 2023)
2. Sandy Levinson, Martin Loughlin on Taming the Judiciary (and Ending the Interpretation Wars) (3 July 2023)
3. Josie Welsh, The Power of a (Lord) Chief Justice (3 July 2023)
4. Emilio Peluso Neder Meyer and Thomas Bustamante, Bolsonaro Faces the Rule of Law (4 July 2023)
5. Mark Buse, The Supreme Court v The Administrative State (3 July 2023)
6. Matthew Gillett, The Kakhovka Dam and Ecocide (3 July 2023)
7. Andrew Koppelman, The New, Mysterious Constitutional Right to Discriminate (7 July 2023)
8. Azeem Amedi, Restoring Public Trust in the Indonesian Constitutional Court (29 June 2023)
9. Maria O’Sullivan, Constraining Executive Discretion in the ‘Public Interest’ (5 July 2023)