What’s New in Public Law

–Angélique Devaux, Cheuvreux Notaires, Paris, France, Diplômée notaire, LL.M. Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law

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 European Court of Justice ruled that the recognition of foreign “private divorce” such as Talaq is a matter of state law and not of European law.
2. The Constitutional Court of Turkey ruled that the right to join a union includes the decision-making process of whether or not to join.
3. The Constitutional Court of Indonesia ruled that allowing a company to ban marriage between co-workers is unconstitutional.
4. The Constitutional Court of Germany ruled that the current method of selecting medical students is partly unconstitutional because it violates equal opportunity laws.
5. The Constitutional Court of Columbia ruled that forced human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination is unconstitutional because it violates human dignity.
6. The European Court of Justice ruled that UBER services are covered by services in the field of the transportation; therefore, each member state can regulate the conditions for providing these services.

In the News

1. The Constitutional Court of Armenia is about to be vested of the power to verify the constitutionality of government decisions or laws after the Parliament passes an amendment to the law on the Constitution.
2. The U.S. Senate voted and the U.S. President signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (tax reform).
3. The Uganda Parliament voted to remove the Presidential age limit.
4. The President of Ukraine submitted Anti-Corruption Court law to Parliament

New Scholarship

1. Josephine Jarpa Dawuni & Akua Kuenyehia, International Courts and the African Woman Judges, Routlegde 2018 (examining questions on gender diversity, representative benches, and international courts by focusing on women judges from the continent of Africa)
2. Pietro Faraguna, Constitutional Identity in the EU— A Shield or a Sword?, German Law Journal, 2017, Vol. 18, No. 7,  1617-1640 (elaborating a conceptual map of different conceptions of constitutional identity in the EU and contending that different conceptions and applications of constitutional identity have varying effects on the European composite constitutional adjudication system and that the institutional and procedural framework should be calibrated accordingly)
3. P. Faraguna, “Do you ever have one of those days when everything seems unconstitutional?”: The Italian Constitutional Court strikes down the electoral law once again – Italian Constitutional Court Judgment of 9 February 2017 No. 35, European Constitutional Law Review, 2017, Vol. 13, Issue 4, 778-792 (reporting on Italian Constitutional Court’s decision that struck down part of the electoral law as unconstitutional in 2017; exploring the judgement from a comparative perspective)
4. Jorge Contesse, The International Authority of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights: A Critique of the Conventionality Control Doctrine, International Journal of Human Rights, 2017, forthcoming (discussing the constitutional turn in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights’ recent jurisprudence, exemplified in the adoption of the conventionality control doctrine)
5. Janos Iala-Butora & Andras L. Pap, Illiberal Relations: The Individual, the State and the Dignity of Communities under the Hungarian and Slovak Constitutions, Yearbook of the Institute of East-Central Europe/Rocznik Instytutu Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej 2017; 15(2): 57–77 (focusing on the conceptualization of personhood and constitutionally protected groups, as well as the relationship between the individual and the state, in particular the ethno-cultural majority in two European Union (EU) member states showing illiberal tendencies, Hungary and Slovakia)[Abstract only]
6. Graham Butler, The Coming of Age of the Court’s Jurisdiction in the Common Foreign and Security Policy (2017) 13 (4), European Constitutional Law Review, p. 673-703 (analysing the changing nature of the European Court of Justice’s jurisdiction in EU external relations law)
7. Conor McCormick, Reviewing the Reviewability of the Attorney General for Northern Ireland, [2018] Public Law 22 (examining the historically unreviewable nature of the Attorney General’s powers in Northern Ireland, and contrasting that position with an emerging view of the Northern Ireland High Court)

Calls for Papers and announcements

1. The University of Innsbruck, Austria organizes an international conference on bicameralism on March 22 and 23, 2018.
2. The International Courts and Tribunals Interest Group (ICTIG) of the American Society of International Law (ASIL) calls for papers for a conference to be held at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago, Illinois on February 9, 2018.
3. The Tilburg Law Review calls for papers for is next issue in collaboration with Centre for Enterprise Liability, University of Copenhagen.
4. The Utrecht Journal of International and European Law is accepting submissions for its General Issue on International and European Law to be published in August 2018.
5. The European Society of International Law (ESIL) calls for papers for its 14th Annual Conference to be held in Manchester, United Kingdom, under the auspices of the Manchester International Law Centre (MILC) on 13 to 15 September 2018.
6. The Faculty of Law of the Eötvös Loránd University and the International Society of Public Law (ICON-S) calls for papers for their international conference on ‘The Power of Public Law in the 21st Century’ to be held in Budapest, Hungary on April 20th, 2018.
7. Last call: The Younger Comparativists Committee of the American Society of Comparative Law calls for papers for its 7th Annual Conference to be held on 20-21 April, 2018 at Case Western Reserve University School of Law in Cleveland, Ohio.

Elsewhere Online

1. Asma Alouane, The ECtHR rules on the compatibility with the right to respect for private and family life of the refusal of registration of same-sex marriages contracted abroad, conflictoflaws.net
2. Allen Rostron, The Clash of Gun Rights and Federalism, Jurist.org
3. Michal Krajewski, ‘Conditional’ primacy of EU law and its deliberative value: An imperfect illustration from Tarricco II, European Law Blog
4. Dimitry Kochenov, Laurent Pech, Kim Lane Scheppele, The European Commission’s Activation of Article 7 : Better Late Than Never, EU law Analysis
5. Ruthann Robson, Ninth Circuit Finds Presidential Travel Ban 3.0 Unlawful, Constitutional Law Prof Blog
6. Maxime St-Hilaire, Alexis Wawanoloath, Stephanie Chouinard, Marc-Antoine Gervais, The refusal by some to recognize mandatory bilingualism at the Supreme Court is indefensible and breeds its own sort of colonialism, Policy Options Politiques
7. Ann Applebaum, Poland is illegally dismantling its own Constitution. Can the E.U. do anything?, The Washington Post