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What’s New: Week of July 6

– Sarthak Gupta, Advocate and Researcher (Supreme Court of India and Columbia University)

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 Constitutional Court of South Korea upheld the constitutionality of bans on election offices and support committees for proportional representation primary candidates, leaving the restrictions in place after no opinion secured the required six votes.
  2. The Constitutional Court of South Africa upheld the majority provisions of the Copyright Amendment Bill, affirming the constitutionality of key copyright exceptions such as fair use while requiring Parliament to revise certain education-related provisions.
  3. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship, the guarantee of citizenship to virtually everyone born in the United States.
  4. The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights struck out the case challenging Estonia’s prison tobacco ban after one applicant died and the remaining two no longer pursued their claims following their release from prison.
  5. The U.S. Supreme Court held that states can exclude transgender athletes from women’s and girls’ sports teams. It unanimously ruled that laws enacted by Idaho and West Virginia do not violate federal civil rights laws.
  6. The German Federal Fiscal Court upheld the constitutionality of Baden-Württemberg’s State Property Tax Act, confirming that its land value-based property tax model complies with the German Constitution.

In the News

  1. Algerians voted in parliamentary elections overshadowed by the disqualification of hundreds of candidates and concerns over low voter turnout amid economic hardship and political restrictions.
  2. India’s Central Board of Secondary Education issued guidelines relaxing implementation of its contested three-language policy, exempting current 10th grade students from compliance, and allowing younger students studying two foreign languages to continue, provided they also study one Indian language.
  3. The Constitutional Court of South Africa declared unlawful the Western Cape government’s 2015 disposal of the Tafelberg site in Sea Point, ruling that the province and the City of Cape Town have failed to discharge their constitutional obligation to redress apartheid-era spatial planning through affordable, well-located housing, and ordering both to report to the High Court within three months.
  4. Iran began a seven-day state funeral for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, assassinated in a joint U.S.–Israeli strike in February, with ceremonies running across Tehran, Qom, Najaf and Karbala before burial in Mashhad on 9 July, under his son and successor, Mojtaba Khamenei.
  5. Venezuela’s interim government under Delcy Rodríguez continued to face scrutiny over its response to the 24 June earthquakes, with the confirmed death toll surpassing 2,600 and tens of thousands still unaccounted for, compounding questions over the constitutional basis of her presidency following Nicolás Maduro’s capture by U.S. forces in January.
  6. Zimbabwe’s Senate approved constitutional amendments extending presidential and parliamentary terms from five to seven years and replacing direct presidential election with parliamentary selection, sending the bill to President Mnangagwa for assent notwithstanding a pending Constitutional Court challenge brought by war veterans and civil society groups.

New Scholarship

  1. Pranav Verma, ‘Forty-Five Years of Public Interest Litigations in India: Its Changing Constituencies and the Rise of the Regulatory Court‘, International Journal of Constitutional Law (2026) (surveys nearly 750 reported PIL judgments and orders of the Supreme Court of India over four and a half decades to trace the declining presence of poor and disadvantaged petitioners on the PIL docket and the corresponding rise of regulatory and private disputes litigated through the PIL route.)
  2. Issi Rosen-Zvi and Meir H. Yarom, ‘Constitutional Methodology and the Perils of Positivity: A Reply to Barak Medina‘, International Journal of Constitutional Law (2026) (critically examines Barak Medina’s proposal for constraining the Knesset’s constituent power in the absence of procedural safeguards, questioning whether the Israeli Supreme Court’s interpretive practice can be reconstructed as an “equilibrium” requirement.)
  3. Mila Versteeg, ‘Empirical Constitutional Studies: The State of the Field‘ International Journal of Constitutional Law (2026) (traces the development of empirical constitutional scholarship from large-scale coding of constitutional texts to newer datasets capturing the “small-c” constitution, and charts a methodological shift towards explanation-oriented, causally-driven research designs.)
  4. Quinn Yeargain, ‘Translating “Substantive Due Process” into State Constitutional Parlance‘, SSRN, 2026 (argues that as the U.S. Supreme Court retreats from a robust substantive due process doctrine, advocates and litigants are increasingly turning to state constitutions, and proposes a vocabulary for courts to articulate unenumerated rights claims independently of federal doctrine.)
  5. Amber Polk, ‘Environmental Rights Amendments as Constitutional (Not Environmental) Law‘ Wisconsin Law Review, forthcoming 2026 (draws on Held v. Montana and the Navahine settlement to argue that state constitutional environmental rights amendments are best understood, doctrinally, as instances of general constitutional rights litigation rather than as a distinct category of environmental law.)

Calls for Papers and Announcements

  1. The 10th SIEL Global Conference invites submissions for its conference, “Reimagining International Economic Law: Reasons, Challenges, and Future Directions,” to be held on July 7–9, 2027, at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. Submissions are due by July 31, 2026.
  2. UC Irvine School of Law will host its 16th Annual Supreme Court Term In Review symposium on 7 July 2026, bringing together scholars to assess the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2025–26 Term shortly after its conclusion.
  3. The Constitutional Law and Jurisprudence Division of the American Political Science Association has issued its call for proposals for the APSA 2026 Annual Meeting (Boston, 3–6 September 2026), themed “Democracy under Threat: How to Understand, Protect, and Rebuild,” inviting panels connecting constitutional law and jurisprudence to questions of democratic backsliding, judicial review, and institutional design.
  4. Florida State University College of Law has announced its Seventeenth Annual Constitutional Law Colloquium, to be held on 6–7 November 2026 on its Tallahassee campus.
  5. The Constitutional Accountability Center invites applications from third-year law students and recent law graduates seeking a host organization for externally funded legal fellowships beginning in Fall 2027. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis. More details can be found here.
  6. Maastricht University invites abstracts for the interdisciplinary conference “Whose Values? – Article 2 TEU under an Interdisciplinary Microscope,” to be held on February 1–2, 2027, in Maastricht, the Netherlands. Abstracts are due by June 30, 2026.

Elsewhere Online

  1. Babette De Naeyer, ‘Am I Allowed to Rant?’: The Sour Aftertaste of Miladze v. Georgia, (Strasbourg Observers, 30 June 2026).
  2. Farah Peterson, The Limits of Text, (The Yale Law Forum, 30 June 2026).
  3. Jonah Godswill, Winning the Right, Losing the Protection?, (Volkerrechtsblog, 30 June 2026).
  4. Jake S. Truscott & Adam Feldman, The 2025-26 term by the numbers, (SCOTUS Blog, 1 July 2026).
  5. Kevin Bloom, The Truth of Spatial Apartheid — ConCourt Delivers a History Lesson to DA, (Daily Maverick, 2 July 2026).
  6. Daniel McCarthy, A Supreme Mistake on Birthright Citizenship (Compact, 2 July 2026).

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