What’s New in Comparative Public Law

–Angelique Devaux, French Licensed Attorney (Notaire)

In this weekly feature, I-CONnect publishes a curated reading list of developments in comparative 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 comparative public law blogosphere.

To submit relevant developments for our weekly feature on “What’s New in Comparative Public Law,” please email contact.iconnect@gmail.com.

Developments in Constitutional Courts

1. The Constitutional Court of Kosovo upheld an amendment to Kosovo Constitution approving the establishment of the New Brussels-backed tribunal.
2. The Canadian Supreme Court ruled that the practice of prayer at city council meetings infringes on constitutional rights of non-believers.
3. The United States Supreme Court ruled that private medical providers cannot sue a state over Medicaid funding.
4. The Mexican Supreme Court ruled marriage ban discriminatory.
5. Minnesota’s Supreme Court ruled that giving drugs to someone to hide is not the same as selling the drugs.
6. Virginia’s Supreme Court ruled that a judge lacked authority to order a website to reveal information.
7. The Irish Supreme Court ruled that evidence obtained in criminal cases in breach of constitutional principles need not necessarily be excluded at trial.

In the News

1. Malawi enacted the Marriage, Divorce and Family Relations Act of 2015.
2. The Thai Constitution Drafting Committee (CDC) announced the completion of the first draft of a potential constitutional charter and its submission to an advisory council for review.
3. A French court allows women to adopt a same-sex spouse’s children born in foreign countries through artificial insemination.
4. The Chile president signed a same-sex civil union law.
5. France started to discuss the new surveillance bill.
6. The Tennessee governor signed legislation providing additional employment protections for handgun owners. 

New Scholarship

1. Shawn Marie Boyne, A Closer Look at Discretion: The Prosecution of Serious Economic Crimes, The German Prosecution Service: Guardians of the Law?, Springer, Forthcoming, (examining the prosecution of serious economic crimes and arguing that economic crimes prosecutors possess wide latitude in how they choose to investigate and prosecute economic crimes)
2. Christopher McCrudden, Transnational Culture Wars, I.CON International Journal of Constitutional Law, Forthcoming, (studying how transnational culture wars are conducted in courts)
3. Sherally Munshi, ‘You Will See My Family Became so American’: Towards a Minor Comparativism, American Journal of Comparative Law, 2015, Forthcoming, (examining the role that laws regulating citizenship, immigration, and naturalization in the United States have played in constructing the appearance of racial difference, in turn, naturalizing whiteness as the embodiment of citizenship by focusing in particular on the experience of Indian immigrants to the United States in the early twentieth century)
4. Antoni Abat i Ninet, Constitutional Crowdsourcing to reconcile Demos and Aristos, To the people who inhabit Iceland, (analysing the Icelandic experience from a critical perspective identifying the elements that ended with the crowdsourced constitution and aiming to provide different elements to improve the constitutional crowdsourcing experiment to be considered in future constituent processes around the world based on the Icelandic experience, by simulating a judgment for a formal perspective)
5. Mohamed H. Farel, Religious Law, Family Law and Arbitration: Shari’a and Halakha in America, Chicago-Kent Law Review, Vol. 90, No.1, 2015, (discussing how private arbitration as a forum in which family law disputes could be settled according to the principles of Islamic law are reviewed by a public court for conformity with public policy in America)
6. Maurice Oduor, The Status of International Law in Kenya, Africa Nazarene University Law Journal, Vol. 2, pp. 97-125 (2014) (highlighting the fact that although the Kenya Constitution of 2010 recognizes international law, it fails to create a rank that can be used to resolve conflicts between local legislation and a rule of international law, and thus, if uncertainty is to be removed, a constitutional amendment is necessary) 

Calls for Papers 

1. The California International Law Journal invites submissions of articles for publication for its next Volume XXIII (August 2015).
2. The European Law Journal calls for papers for its 2016 special issue.
3. Association Française pour les Nations Unies Aix-en-Provence calls for papers for its Volume 38 – Human rights 2.0: What protection in the digital age?
4. The International Economic Law Interest Group of the European Society of International Law has issued a call for papers for a workshop to be held on September 9, 2015, in Oslo, preceding the ESIL Annual Conference.
5. The Maritime Safety and Security Law Journal calls for papers for its issue 1, June 2015.
6. The Association of American Law Schools, Section on Legal Writing, Reasoning and Research calls for proposals for the 2016 AALS Annual Meeting to be held on January 6 – 10, 2016 in New York, NY.
7. The Michigan Law Review is currently accepting submissions for its 2016 Survey of Books related to the law.
8. The Searle Center on Law, Regulation, and Economic Growth issued a call for original research papers to be presented at the Eighth Annual Conference on Antitrust Economics and Competition Policy at Northwestern University School of Law, Chicago, Illinois, on Sept. 18 and 19, 2015.

Elsewhere on Blogs

1. Canadian Supreme Court Finds Opening Prayer at Town Meeting Unconstitutional, Constitutional Law Prof Blog
2. Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Needle Exchanges and the Public’s Health, Jurist.org
3. Commentary: The Supreme Court and marriage for same-sex couples — Part II, SCOTUS blog
4. Europe’s Tough Case Against Google, International New York Times, Editorial Board
5. Linda Greenhouse, Speaking Truth to the Supreme Court, The New York Times
6. Opinion 2/13 of the Court of Justice on Access of the EU to the ECHR – One step ahead and two steps back, European Law Blog