Skip to main content

What’s New: Week of December 22

– Wilson Seraine da Silva Neto, PhD Candidate in Law & Economics at the Faculty of Law, University of Lisbon; Assistant Professor at the University of Coimbra.

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. Austrian’s Supreme Court held that Meta must provide full access to all personal data of the user within 14 days, including the sources, recipients and purposes for which each information was used. The Supreme Court also held that Meta must also ensure that data revealing sensitive information (such as political views, sexual orientation, or health) is not processed together with other data unless a valid legal basis, and Meta must stop providing personalized advertisements to people who never had a legal basis to process their personal data for this purpose.
  2. The U.S. Supreme Court turned down a request from the Trump administration to stay a lower court ruling from taking effect, allowing hearing over dispute over a policy limiting speaking engagements by immigration judges to continue.
  3. Portugal’s Constitutional Court (Tribunal Constitucional) ruled that several norms in the recently approved amendments to the Nationality Law are unconstitutional.
  4. Slovakia’s Constitutional Court announced that it had suspended a law abolishing the country’s whistleblower protection office, after protests in recent days.
  5. Taiwan’s Constitutional Court effectively reactivated itself, declaring amendments that had prevented it from delivering rulings for more than a year unconstitutional, adding to an ongoing constitutional crisis.

In the News:

  1. The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case of Terry Pitchford, a Mississippi man who argues that the death sentence awarded to him violates a constitutional ban on racial discrimination in jury selection.
  2. The European Court of Justice found that Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal violated core principles of EU law, and cannot be considered independent or impartial due to the manner of judicial appointments. The ruling rekindles a clash over measures to reshape the judicial system by the Polish government.
  3. Benin’s President Patrice Talon promulgated a law enacting a major revision of the constitution, after the Constitutional Court validated that these amendments conformed to the fundamental law. The amendments extend presidential terms from five to seven years, and establish a Senate, creating a bicameral legislature.
  4. The Canadian Supreme Court is deliberating on a case that could affect how Gladue principles (governing sentencing for Indigenous people) are applied in cases where both the offender and victim are Indigenous. The ruling could have significant effects for Nunavut, which has an Inuit majority.
  5. The 7th Belarusian People’s Congress elected Andrei Shved the Chairman of Belarus’ Supreme Court.

New Scholarship:

  1. Hans-Martien ten Napel, ‘The Netherlands at the Crossroads: On the Need for a Covenantal Comeback for Principled Pluralism’ (2025) 23 The Review of Faith & International Affairs 76-88 (arguing for covenantal, rather than principled, pluralism in the Netherlands).
  2. Joana Mendes, Separation of Powers in the European Union (2025) LCEL Research Paper 2025/3 (this chapter analyses the normative meaning of institutional balance in the European Union (EU) and its frequent conflation with separation of power)
  3. Melanie Fink and Simona Demkova, The Constitutional Foundation of Explanation Rights in EU Digital Regulation: A Contextual Approach (2025) SSRN (through two scenarios involving organisations facing overlapping obligations and explanation duties distributed across AI decision-making chains, the article demonstrates how these strengths enable constitutional and sectoral rights to reinforce each other).
  4. Richard Albert, Against Unamendability (2025) U of Texas Law, Legal Studies Research Paper (the author makes the case that unamendability is not a technology worth encoding in any constitution)
  5. Richard Albert, David Landau, Pietro Faraguna, Giulia Andrade (editors), Global Review of Constitutional Law (2025) University of Texas (the book features dozens of country reports on constitutional development in the year of 2024)
  6. Yuichiro Tsuji, Modern Administrative Structures in Japan (2025) SSRN (this study examines administrative authority and policy-making by public officials from a constitutional law perspective (especially that of the Japanese Constitution)

Call for Papers and Announcements:

  1. The ICON-S International Society for Public Law Central and Eastern European Chapter calls for submissions to their annual conference, to be held at University of Ljubljana Faculty of Law on 14-15 May 2026. Abstract submissions are due by 31 January 2026.
  2. The University of Coimbra Institute for Legal Research has opened the applications for the post-doctoral programme (2026-2027).
  3. The University of Coimbra Institute for Legal invites applications to the Researchers’ Camp Programme, which is an intensive training programme for people who want to pursue and advance a career in research, ideal for master’s and doctoral students, as well as young researchers. The event will take place in person at Colégio da Trindade, from 4 to 5 February 2026. Registration is open till 16 January or until all places are filled.
  4. The Jean Monnet Network BRIDGE Watch: Values and Democracy in the EU and Latin America, co-funded by Erasmus+, LACES and the Faculty of Law of the University of Lisbon, invites young researchers (up to 35 years old) to apply for the VI Jean Monnet Prize in Social Sciences, under the theme “The Globalization of EU Values and Democracy”. The deadline is 1 June 2026.
  5. The Centre for Research in European, Economic, Financial and Tax Law invites the academic community to submit scientific articles for the Conference Deglobalization: Challenges for Regulation, Tariffs, and Monetary Policies, to be held in a hybrid format on 27 February 27. Complete draft articles must be submitted by 23 January, 2026, at 23:59 (Lisbon time, GMT)
  6. The Faculty of Law of the University of Lisbon invites the academic community to the Intensive Course: “Russian law – the legal system of a country at war” with the Professor Herbert Küpper. The course will take place between 20 and 24 April 2026.

Elsewhere Online:

  1. Amy Howe, How the tariffs could be refunded if the court sides against Trump, SCOTUSblog (18 December 2025)
  2. David Sobreira, Subvertendo o constitucionalismo abusive, Jota
  3. Richard Garnett, Religious schools and religious rites, SCOTUSblog (2 December 2025)
  4. The Editorial Board, The Supreme Court Is Failing at Its Most Important Job, The New York Times (6 December 2025)
  5. Wojciech Sadurski, The CJEU Versus the Constitutional Tribunal in Poland, Verfassungsblog (20 December 2025)

Leave a Reply