What’s New in Comparative Public Law

–Patrick Yingling, Reed Smith LLP

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 U.S. Supreme Court was asked to review same-sex marriage cases from Kentucky and Michigan following a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruling that upheld bans.
2. A Hong Kong court notice ordering authorities to start clearing protest sites that have been occupied for seven weeks was published in leading newspapers.
3. The question of whether Canada’s Métis and non-status Indians have a right to the same programs and services as First Nations and Inuit has fallen to the country’s Supreme Court.
4. The U.K. Supreme Court will consider whether the government was entitled to override a court and block the disclosure of letters sent by Prince Charles to ministers in which he sought to influence official policies.
5. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld a Mississippi campaign finance law that requires disclosure of political contributions.

In the News

1. Speaker of the Myanmar Pyithu Hluttaw, Thura U Shwe Mann, announced that no amendments will be made to the constitution until after next year’s elections, creating confusion for opposition parties.
2. Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has dissolved the lower house of parliament, enabling an early election to see how the public views his struggling economic policies.
3. U.S. President Barack Obama announced executive action on immigration that would allow 4.7 million undocumented immigrants to stay in the United States.
4. The Constitutional Council of France approved a law that sets out a procedure for removing the president from office in cases where there has been a “breach of their duties that is clearly incompatible with the exercise of their mandate.”
5. Mexico’s government has vowed to take action to restore the credibility of institutions after the disappearance of 43 students more than two months ago.

New Scholarship

1. Tamir Moustafa, Law and Courts in Authoritarian Regimes, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Vol. 10 (2014) 281-299 (examining the ways in which law and courts are deployed as instruments of governance, how they structure state-society contention, and the circumstances in which courts are transformed into sites of active resistance)
2. Yaniv Roznai, The Insecurity of Human Security, Wisconsin International Law Journal, Vol. 32, No. 1, 2014 (clarifying the distinctions between national security and human security, and demonstrating how this term—“human security”—cuts across the familiar dichotomy between human rights and security by approaching subjects that were typically the concern of human rights discourse through a security prism)
3. Dawood I. Ahmed & Moamen Gouda, Measuring Constitutional Islamization: The Islamic Constitutions Index, Hastings International and Comparative Law Review, Forthcoming (exploring the universe of constitutional clauses that incorporate Islam and measuring and ranking Muslim countries’ constitutions based on their Islamicity)
4. David Schleicher, Things Aren’t Going That Well Over There Either: Party Polarization and Election Law in Comparative Perspective, University of Chicago Legal Forum, Vol. 2015, Forthcoming (arguing that a common shift in voter preferences towards more radical and fundamentalist opinion among even a small slice of the electorate can explain polarization in the United States and changes in politics abroad)
5. Jenia Iontcheva Turner, The Exclusionary Rule as a Symbol of the Rule of Law, Southern Methodist University Law Review, Vol. 67, 2014 (comparing approaches to the exclusionary rule and concluding with tentative predictions about the future of the rule in the United States and in new democracies)

Elsewhere Online

1. Lissa Griffin, Prosecutorial Discretion Revisited: Charging, Comparative Law Prof Blog
2. Andrea Pin, Tearing Down Sovereign Immunity’s Fence–The Italian Constitutional Court, the International Court of Justice, and the German War Crimes, Opinio Juris
3. Prashant Jha, Nepal’s Constitution making: Bringing consensus back to Kathmandu, ConstitutionNet
4. James Hand & Donal Coffey, Miliband’s senate of the regions and a constitutional convention conundrum, UK Constitutional Law Association
5. Will Baude, The danger of signing unconstitutional laws, The Volokh Conspiracy
6. Rosalind English, Irish Supreme Court struggles with outcome of surrogacy arrangements, UK Human Rights Blog
7. Nathan Gardels, Weekend Roundup: Is China Outpacing Mexico on the Rule of Law?, The World Post

Calls for Papers

1. The editors of the Cambridge Journal of International and Comparative Law and Hart Publishing have issued a call for papers for the Journal’s 4th annual conference to be held at the University of Cambridge on 8–9 May 2015.
2. The Editorial Board of Biodiritto has launched, in occasion of the third issue of the journal, a call for papers dedicated to “Freedom of Scientific Research and Drug Testing.”
3. The Younger Comparativists Committee of the American Society of Comparative Law has issued a call for participants for one (1) YCC scholar to attend a conference on “Access to Counsel During Criminal Proceedings:  Reshaping Rights and Remedies,” to be held on May 18-20, 2015, at the University of Warwick School of Law in England.
4. Organizers have issued a call for papers for the 10th Annual Carleton Law and Legal Studies Graduate Conference on “Heroes and Villains: Imaginaries of Justice,” to be held on March 13, 2015, at Carleton University, in Ottawa, Canada.
5. Dr. Shana Cohen of the Woolf Institute in Cambridge, United Kingdom has issued a call for papers for a workshop on “Minorities and Popular Culture in the Modern Middle East”