What’s New in Comparative Public Law

–Rohan Alva, Jindal Global Law School

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.

Development in Constitutional Courts

1. The Indian Supreme Court has ordered that the initial testimony of victims of sexual assault must be recorded before a judge, instead of the police, in order to hasten investigations and the trial process, and also to prevent the traumatic experience of victims having to narrate their testimony on multiple occasions.
2. The Supreme Constitutional Court of Syria has begun the process of scrutinizing the applications of the twenty-four applicants who wish to contest Syria’s presidential elections. The Court will scrutinize the applications over a span of five days. The presidential elections are to be held on June 3.
3. The Constitutional Court of Turkey declined to accept an appeal, on procedural grounds, which impugned the government’s decision to restrict the celebration of May Day in Taksim Square, located in the city of Istanbul. On May Day, police forces resorted to the use of coercive means to disperse protesters endeavoring to assemble at the Square.
4. The Latvian Constitutional Court is to hold elections to choose the Court’s new President.
5. The US Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency is empowered to regulate matters of ‘air pollution that drifts across state borders’.

New Scholarship

1. Mohamed Arafa & Patrick  Yingling, After the Revolution: Egypt’s Changing Forms of Corruption, University of Baltimore Journal of International Law (forthcoming 2014) (contrasting forms of conventional and unconventional corruption, analyzing corruption in Egypt under the new constitution, and constructing a campaign finance regime that could catalyze true democracy in Egypt)
2. Dirk van Zyl Smit, Pete Weatherby and Simon Creighton, Whole Life Sentences and the Tide of European Human Rights Jurisprudence: What Is to Be Done? 14 Human Rights Law Review 59 (2014) (analyzing the ECHR’s Grand Chamber decision in Vinter v. United Kingdom which mandates that those who have been imprisoned for life must be afforded the opportunity of having the continuance of their sentence being reviewed, and evaluating the necessary changes that would need to be made to English law)
3. Kaarlo Tuori and Klaus Tuori, The Eurozone Crisis: A Constitutional Analysis, Cambridge University Press (2014) (presenting a detailed appraisal from a constitutional standpoint of the handling of the economic crisis in Europe)
4. Manoj Mate, State Constitutions and the Basic Structure Doctrine, 45 Columbia Human Rights Law Review 442 (2014) (arguing for state level courts in the United State of America to utilize the Basic Structure Doctrine, an important Indian constitutional law principle which places restrictions on the extent to which certain aspects of the Indian Constitution that can be amended, in order to accord a greater degree of protection to important rights in a state’s constitution from majoritarian abridgments)
5. Bjoern Dressel and Marco Buente (eds), Contemporary South East Asia (Special Focus on Constitutional Politics in South Asia), Volume 36 (2014) (identifying four key aspects, the debate over will indicate how respect for constitutional norms will be fostered amongst nations in Southeast Asia, and focusing on the kind of constitutional models emerging in the different countries)
6. D. Brian Dennison, Popular and Aversive Constitutionalism in Uganda: Limiting American-Style Judicial Review by Design, 10 Regents Journal of International Law 45 (2014) (evaluating the nature of attenuation of judicial review by the Ugandan Constitution and seeking to understand the “aversive effect” that the nature of judicial review as practiced by the U.S. Supreme Court has had upon the type of judicial review permissible under Uganda’s Constitution)

In the News

1. Elections are currently underway in Iraq to elect representatives for the nation’s parliament, even as reports suggest recurring instances of violence, aimed at destabilizing the electoral process, having occurred.
2. In a bid to counteract Russia’s current interventions in Ukraine’s domestic matters, the Ukrainian President, Oleksandr Turchynov, has decided to reintroduce conscription in the armed forces.
3. The European Parliament has voted to pass the ‘net neutrality law’ in order to ensure equality of treatment for ‘all internet traffic’.
4. In Oklahoma, the execution of Clayton Lockett went horrifically awry as a result of the lethal injection having been improperly administered. The Governor of Oklahoma has now halted further executions and ordered for a formal inquiry into the death of Clayton Lockett.
5. The Marriage Act 2014, a piece of legislation in Kenya, which legally permits polygamous marriages, received the assent of the president of Kenya.

Elsewhere on the Web

1. Khin Su Wai, Teacher Takes Fight to Supreme Court, Myanmar Times
2. Angela Patrick, Not In Our Name: Parliamentary Committee Rejects Government’s Case for Judicial Review Reform, UK Human Rights Blog
3. Molly Hofsommer, The State of Press Freedom Worldwide, Human Rights  First
4. Nell Hirschmann-Levy and Meghan McLoughlin, Children’s Lives at Stake: U.S. Policies of Incarcerating Children in Adult Correctional Facilities, Human Rights at Home Blog
5. Vishwajith Sadananda, India’s Third Gender and the Kaushal Problem, Oxford Human Rights Hub Blog

Call for Papers

1. Papers are invited by the Centre for Food Security and Agro-Economy (Gujrat National Law University, India) for a conference on International Trade Implications of National Food Security Act, 2013, to be held on the 9th of August 2014. Papers are to be submitted by the 25th of May.
2. A call for papers has been issued for a symposium on Capitalism, Antitrust, and Democracy, which is to be held on the 8th of November 2014. Proposals for the symposium, which is being organised by the Law and Society Programme (Philadelphia University) and the Antitrust Bulletin, are to be sent in by the June 6th.
3. Contributions are requested for the 9th International Conference on Legal, Security and Privacy Issues in IT Law, to be held from the October 15 to 17, 2014, in Portugal. Contributions are due by the 15th of September.
4. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law invites contributions for a special issue on Marginalised Bodies-(Re)imagining the Law. Proposals of papers must be submitted by the 15th of July, 2014.
5. BRICS-Parma invites papers for a conference on The BRICS in the Spotlight: An Interdisciplinary Approach to be held on the 6th and 7th of November, 2014, at the University of Parma. Abstracts of papers are due by the 30th of May. Abstracts may be emailed to brics@unipr.it.