What’s New: Week of September 7

— Dhruv Singhal, Editor-in-Chief, Comparative Constitutional Law and Administrative Law Journal, National Law University, Jodhpur.

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 Supreme Court of India upheld execution by hanging as constitutional under Section 354(5) of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, and Section 393(5) of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, rejecting a plea to switch to methods like lethal injection or shooting. The Court held that hanging’s constitutionality was already settled in a prior binding decision by a larger bench, which they had no power to overturn, but left the door open for future scientific evidence to prompt a fresh challenge before an appropriately larger bench.
2. The General Court of the European Union upheld the European Commission’s decision not to review its own rules on how much greenhouse gas each EU country is allowed to emit. Two civil society groups had argued the Commission’s climate targets were not ambitious enough, but the Court said the Commission only implements targets set by lawmakers and it cannot be asked to overrule them. The ruling matters because it closes off one of the few legal routes citizens had to challenge whether the EU’s climate goals are strong enough.
3. A US District Court in Maryland issued a preliminary injunction against the enforcement of President Trump’s two August executive orders narrowing birthright citizenship, finding they conflict with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v Barbara that children born in the US to unlawfully or temporarily present parents are citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court held that stripping constitutional citizenship from members of a class the Supreme Court had already recognized would cause irreparable harm, underscoring that a lower-court injunction can enforce, but not revisit, a binding Supreme Court precedent the executive branch is bound to follow.
4. Romania’s Constitutional Court upheld a new law that will remove Timișoara’s mayor, Dominic Fritz, from office over a conflict-of-interest finding from before the law existed. The Court said this case was different because it was not punishing Fritz again, and only addressing the “ongoing effects” of his past conduct. Three dissenting judges disagreed, calling this reasoning a workaround that guts the ban on retroactive punishment and also violates the voting rights of EU citizens, since Fritz was elected fairly under the old rules.
5. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Türkiye’s continued detention of civil-society figure Osman Kavala since 2017 is unlawful, finding violations of his rights to free expression, peaceful assembly, a fair trial, and liberty under the European Convention on Human Rights. The majority held that Turkish courts never established a genuine causal link between Kavala’s lawful activism and the violence of others during the 2013 Gezi Park protests, reaffirming that free-speech and assembly rights do not disappear simply because a third party turns violent.

In the News

1. Poland has started legally recognizing same-sex marriages performed in other EU countries. This follows a chain of rulings: the EU’s top court said in late 2025 that Poland must recognize such marriages, Poland’s own top administrative court agreed in March 2026, and registry offices began applying this in practice on 22 August 2026. This happened even though Poland’s president vetoed related bills in July and the country’s Constitutional Tribunal ruled against recognition days later.
2. New Zealand’s Parliament passed a law that makes it impossible to sue companies (or the government) in court for damage caused by their greenhouse gas emissions, even for lawsuits that are already underway. This ended a major ongoing case, Smith v. Fonterra, in which a Māori leader had been suing New Zealand’s biggest polluters over climate harm to his land, and where the courts had already ruled the case could go to trial.
3. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination stated that states have a legal obligation under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination to consider comprehensive reparations for the transatlantic slave trade, framing its continuing effects as an ongoing rather than purely historical harm. General Recommendation No. 40 holds that because slavery’s legacy operates through structural and institutional discrimination against people of African descent, remedies owed under the Convention must extend beyond individual redress to monetary, non-monetary, and structural measures, building on the UN General Assembly’s March resolution recognizing the slave trade as “the gravest crime against humanity,” which the US and some European states opposed.
4. The US House of Representatives failed to advance a Republican-backed joint resolution to amend the Constitution and permanently fix the Supreme Court’s size at nine justices. The Constitution establishes the Court but leaves its size to Congress, which set the current number in 1869 after adjusting it several times since the Judiciary Act of 1789, meaning the proposal’s failure preserves, rather than resolves, the long-running possibility that a future Congress could alter the Court’s composition by ordinary statute.
5. Libya’s rival factions signed a draft agreement charting a path to elections within two years, leaving the permanent constitution to be drafted by the newly elected parliament. The deal gives the House of Representatives and High Council of State one month to ratify it domestically. If either body fails to do so, the parties intend to seek its adoption as a constitutional document through broader national mechanisms backed by the UN Security Council, a fallback that raises questions about the document’s domestic legal authority if it bypasses Libya’s own legislative bodies.

New Scholarship

1. Leonard F.M. Besselink, Nicola Lupo, Mattias Wendel (eds.), Research Handbook on European Constitutional Law (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2026).
2. Yash Sinha, ‘Follow the Wound, Not the Weapon: The Basic Structure Doctrine Can and Must Apply to Laws‘ Comparative Constitutional Law & Administrative Law Journal (2026).
3. Asang Wankhede, ‘The Legal Impossibilty of Maratha Reservations‘ Comparative Constitutional Law & Administrative Law Journal (2026)
4. Ashna Devaprasad, Judges, Speaking Of Death: Criminal Sentencing As A Socio-Cultural Practice In India’s Trial Courts, Socio-Legal Review (2026).
5. Prerna, Recording Transgender Parenthood, Economy & Political Weekly (August 22, 2026)

Calls for Papers and Announcements

1. The Austrian Review of International and European Law invites submissions for volume 31 (2026) by 30 October 2026.
2. The NLUJ Law Review invites submissions for volume XIII, issue 1, by 25 September 2026.
3. Dr Anna Młynarska-Sobaczewska (Institute of Law Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences) invites submissions for an edited volume titled The Right to Housing – Between Utopia and Justiciable Entitlement. The deadline is 30 September 2026.
4. Applications are invited for The Academy in Advanced Legal Research and Method, convened by the Transnational Association of Legal Scholars. The deadline is 1 October 2026.
5. NUJS Kolkata SILP Blog invites posts marking the 80th anniversary of the International Court of Justice. The deadline is 4 October 2026.

Elsewhere Online

1. Ritwik Sharma, When Must The Supreme Court Answer? Re-Thinking Discretion Under Article 143 Through The ‘Institutional Mechanics Effect’, National Law School of India Review Online (12 August 2026).
2. Angela van der Berg, The Constitution Meets the Climate, Verfassungsblog (3 September 2026).
3. V. Venkatesan, When an AI hallucination enters an executive order, Supreme Court Observer (3 September 2026).
4. Camilo Saavedra Herrera, Bargaining Among Partners: Mexico’s 2026 Constitutional Reforms, ConstitutionNet, International IDEA (3 September 2026). 
5. Sahil Hussain Choudhury, Untouchability and the idea of ‘purity’, The Hindu (2 September 2026).