What’s New in Comparative Public Law

–Margaret Lan Xiao, Washington University in St. Louis

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. Zimbabwe: The Constitutional Court rules that three Election Resource Centre employees should not be prosecuted for conducting voter education.
2. Angola: The Constitutional Court upholds the constitutionality of Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-terrorism Financing Law.
3. Colombia: The Constitutional Court has overturned a former ban on bullfighting in Bogota and ruled in favor of Bullfighting Corporation of Bogota.
4. South Africa: The Constitutional Court upholds South African Police Service’s affirmative action policy.
5. New Hampshire: The State Supreme Court has upheld tax credit for contributions to scholarship funds.

In the News

1. Germany: Employment Minister calls for new legislation to abate the levels of workplace stress.
2. Saudi Arabia: The Ministry of Labour has imposed fines totaling $2.6 million over labour law violations.
3. China: The National People’s Congress has revised China’s budgetary law system.
4. Britain: Recent events have renewed the debate on counterterrorism laws.
5. Denmark: Danish Parliament passes gender “self-determination” law.
6. Argentina: Senate passes bill putting defaulted debt out of U.S. courts’ jurisdictional reach.

New Scholarship

1. Tom Ginsburg, Chaining the Dog of War: Comparative Data, SSRN working paper (examining whether and how the power to declare war is entrenched in constitutional texts)
2. Richard Clayton et al, The Emergence of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights in United Kingdom Law, European Human Rights Law Review (forthcoming 2014) (exploring and re-examining the progressive emergence of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights in UK domestic case law)
3. Mark Elliott, Constitutional Legislation, European Union Law and the Nature of the United Kingdom’s Contemporary Constitution, European Constitutional Law Review (forthcoming 2014) (examining the differentiation within the UK constitutional system between “constitutional legislation” and “ordinary legislation”)
4. Veronica Kostenko et al, Attitudes Towards Gender Equality and Perception of Democracy in the Arab World, Higher School of Economics Research Paper No. WP BRP 50/SOC/2014 (arguing that the correlation between endorsement for democracy and gender equality is very low in Arab countries, and statistically showing that as the Middle East modernizes it is also undergoing a significant “retrogression” of social values)
5. Christopher McCrudden, The Pluralism of Human Rights Adjudication, Forthcoming As Chapter 1 of Liora Lazarus, Christopher Mccrudden, And Nigel Bowles (Eds), Reasoning Rights: Comparative Judicial Engagement (Hart Publishing, 2014) (systematically examining the similarities and differences in the judicial reasoning in human rights cases developed by courts when they are addressing comparable human rights questions)
6. Manuel A. Utset, Rational Financial Meltdowns, Hastings Business Law Journal, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2014 (arguing that perfectly rational financial actors will have an incentive to delegate the risks associated with international asymmetries to financial intermediaries, and thereby engender a long chain of blind transactions which might eventually lead to severe aftermaths)
7. Mark Kende, Enforcing the South African Constitution: The Fight for Judicial Independence and Separation of Powers, Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems, Vol. 23, p. 35, Spring 2014 (demonstrating that even under the remarkable pressures from the Executive Branch of the Zuma presidency, the South African Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court of Appeal have issued a series of surprisingly strong and examplary rulings against Zuma on key executive power issues)
8. Jenia Iontcheva Turner, Interstate Conflict and Cooperation in Criminal Cases: An American Perspective, European Criminal Law Review (forthcoming 2014) (analyzing three factors in explaining the diversity of U.S. legal rules in regard to interstate conflict and cooperation in criminal cases: federalism; the baseline harmonization of criminal procedures under the U.S. Constitution; and  the regular involvement of U.S. federal government agencies in investigations and prosecutions of interstate cases)

Calls for Papers

1. The Lincoln Memorial University Law Review Call for Papers for the symposium on “The Snowden Effect: The Impact of Spilling National Secrets,” to be held in Knoxville on January 30, 2015.
2. American Indian Law Journal is now calling for submissions of papers for its upcoming spring 2015 issue.
3. The First Amendment Law Review at the UNC School of Law has issued a Call for Papers for its Symposium Edition “First Amendment Networks: Issues in Net Neutrality.”
4. Oil, Gas and Energy Law Intelligence has invited submissions of papers for two of its upcoming special issues.
5. The Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School issues a call for abstracts for its 2015 Annual Conference on Law, Religion and Healthcare.
6. International Journal of Law and Legal Jurisprudence Studies issues a call for paper for its upcoming issue.

Elsewhere on Blogs

1. Russell Leigh Moses, Doubters Question China’s Corruption Push, The Wall Street Journal
2. Kim Rubenstein & Jacqui Field, Australia’s dual citizenship laws should not be diluted in terror fight, The Australian.com.au
3. Brianne J. Gorod, The Odds of Supreme Court Review of the Latest Obamacare Challenges Just Got a Lot Lower, The Huffington Post
4. Austin Ramzy, Lawsuit Raises Questions Over China’s Internet Censorship, The New York Times Blog
5. Eugene Volokh, The “Supreme Court’s own buffer zone” trope, The Washington Post Blog
6. Natalia Warat, Elections Boost Trust in Indonesia’s Constitutional Court, The Asia Foundation