What’s New in Public Law

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–Susan Achury, Visiting Lecturer at Texas Christian University

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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 Court

1. The US Supreme Court ruled against Texas’s challenge to the Affordable Care Act based on a procedural issue of standing.
2. The US Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Catholic foster care agency, declaring it a violation of the free exercise of religion the decision of ending its contract after they refused to work with same-sex couples.
3. The Colombian Constitutional Court ruled that a woman with HIV was fired without just cause and granting a special protection.
4. Russian Constitutional Court ruled allowing the enforcement of debt judgments on bankrupt’s sole home.
5. The Mexican Supreme Court determined that it is “mandatory” for Mexico to comply with the measures of the Committee against Forced Disappearance (CED) of the United Nations (UN).
6. The Constitutional Court of Spain ruled constitutional sanctions of disqualification from running for popular election positions for electoral crimes.
7. The Romanian Constitutional Court ruled that the Special Section for magistrates of the Section for Investigation of Criminal Crimes (SIIJ) can be dismantled only by the Parliament and not by ordinary courts. In the reasoning, the court argued that the priority of the application of EU law must not be perceived in the sense of removing or disregarding the national constitutional identity.

In the News

1. Ecuador implements Constitutional Court Rulings Protecting Rights
2. Turkey’s Constitutional Court will conduct its first examination in a case filed for the closure of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP).
3. The Colombian Senate decided to accuse the former magistrate before the Supreme Court of Justice for alleged acts of corruption.
4. Poland’s Constitutional Court postponed for the third time its review of whether the country must comply with a demand by the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) to suspend judicial reform, which was declared to be contrary to EU law.
5. The Mexican Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation is scheduled to discuss the general declaration of unconstitutionality on the prohibition of the use of marijuana.
6. In Spain, the political party Vox has challenged the constitutionality of the Euthanasia Law, arguing it violates the constitutional right to life
7. Hungarian Parliament adopted a bill banning LGBT content in schools.
8. In Peru, the presidential election results have been challenged in courts through requests for annulment.
9. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) received climate activists’ challenge to Norway’s Arctic oil plans.
10. European Parliament urged European Commission to support patent waiver for COVID-19 vaccine.

New Scholarship

1. Yun-chien Chang, Nuno Garoupa, and Martin T Wells, Drawing the Legal Family Tree: An Empirical Comparative Study of 170 Dimensions of Property Law in 129 Jurisdictions (2021) (providing a taxonomy of legal systems, based on their legal family tree and created using variance on property law using an average-linkage agglomerative hierarchical clustering, an unsupervised machine-learning method).
2. Adam Chilton, Justin Driver, Jonathan S. Masur, and Kyle Rozema, Assessing Affirmative Action’s Diversity Rationale (2021) (providing empirical support for the benefits of diversity in higher education that supports the constitutionality of affirmative action programs by looking at student-run law reviews).
3. Evan D. Bernick, Eliminating Constitutional Law (2021) (arguing that theories of law should include a factor interpretive choice).
4. Jorge Ernesto Roa, La ciudadania dentro de la sala de maquinas del constitucionalismo transformador latinoamericano (2021) (arguing that Latin America transformative constitutionalism builds on broad access to constitutional justice to materialize social promises contained in constitutions).
5. Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (2021) (analyzing the constitutional conflicts arising from fakes news and democratic principles and examining solutions to an “epistemic crisis” of an American crisis of information).
6. Martin Belov, Peace, Discontent and Constitutional Law: Challenges to Constitutional Order and Democracy (2021) (exploring how constitutions serve as a reliable framework for peaceful co-existence while allowing for reasonable and legitimate discontent).
7. Hèctor López Bofill, Law, Violence and Constituent Power: The Law, Politics, and History of Constitution Making (2021) (arguing that legitimacy of the constitution-making in liberal democracies is based on violence).
8. Fruzsina Gárdos-Orosz and Zoltán Szente, Populist Challenges to Constitutional Interpretation in Europe and Beyond (2021) (exploring the relationship between populism or populist regimes and constitutional interpretation used in those regimes).
9. Andrej Lang, Non-judicial rights review of counterterrorism policies: The role of fundamental rights in the making of the counterterrorism database and the data retention legislation in Germany (2021) (examining how rights considerations affect the making of anti-terrorism policy in Germany).
10. Chiara Valentini, Deliberative Democracy, Social Rights and the Modulation of Judicial Review (2021) (examining the idea of a “third way” for judicial action that mediates between judicial inertia and activism).
11. Guillaume Tusseau, Comparative constitutional litigation: A critical introduction to constitutional procedural law (2021) (examining the procedural rules of nearly 200 constitutional justice systems).

Calls for Papers and Announcements

1. The Comparative Constitutional Law Research Forum of the Centre for Comparative and Transnational Law at CUHK law invites submissions for a workshop on “Issues in Public Law in South Asia.” (Abstract due July 30).
2. The Comparative Constitutional Law and Administrative Law journal invite papers for his Volume 6 Issue 1. (Submissions due August 15).
3. The Review of European Administrative Law invites an online discussion on the edited collection Cases, materials, and texts on judicial review of administrative action (Hart 2019) on July 2021).
4. The University of Miami School of Law and the University of Houston Law Center invites submissions for a Virtual Colloquium on Race, Racism, and American Media. (Submissions due June 21).
5. The Chair of French Public Law at Saarland University is recruiting an Assistant to the Editor-in-Chief for a comparative public law journal to be published in English.
6. Curtin Law School at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, invites submissions for the International Trade and Business Law Review. (Submissions due July 31).
7. International Journal for The Semiotics Of Law & Comparative Legilinguistics issued a call for papers for three special issues on “COVID-19 infodemic –between law, ethics, and fake news.” (Abstract due December 10).
8. Eurac Research invites applications for the 2022 Federal Scholar in Residence Program in Italy. (Applications due July 1).
9. The Northern Illinois University College of Law is accepting proposals for the Fourth Annual Chicagoland Junior Scholars Conference on October 1, 2021. (Abstract due June 25)
10. The University of New Hampshire Law Review Fall 2021 invites submission for the Symposium on “The War on Drugs 50 Years Later: Where we are and Where we’re Going.”
11. The South Dakota Law Review invites submissions to a symposium on issues related to marijuana law. (Abstracts due July 1).
12. The Comparative Constitutions Project announced the latest release of its data on Characteristics of National Constitutions, updated through the end of 2020.

Elsewhere Online

1. Javier Rodríguez Sandoval, El voto nulo y el triunfo de la derecha en Ecuador, Nueva Sociedad.
2. Evangelia Psychogiopoulou and Federica Casarosa, Social Media, Fundamental Rights And Courts In Europe, British Association of Comparative Law.
3. María Sosa Mendoza, Perú: ¿de la indignación a una nueva Constitución? Nueva Sociedad
4. Jacob Gursky and Samuel Woolley, Countering disinformation and protecting democratic communication on encrypted messaging applications, Brookings.
5. Joel I. Colón-Ríos, Of Colonies and Empires, IACL-AIDC Blog.
6. Seána Glennon, More Power to the People? The Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality and The Future for Minipublic Deliberation in Ireland, IACL-AIDC Blog.
7. Kate Dommett, Constitutional reformers need to tackle six key questions about the regulation of digital campaigning, The Constitution Unit.
8. Stoyan Panov, The Role of the European Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Magnitsky Sanctions, JURIST.
9. Louis Rene Beres, Politics, Law and the Triumph of Chaos, JURIST.