What’s New in Public Law

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—Eman Muhammad Rashwan, Ph.D. Candidate in the European Doctorate in Law & Economics (EDLE), Hamburg University, Germany; Assistant Lecturer of Public Law, Cairo University, Egypt.

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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 Courts

1. On Monday, The U.S. Supreme Court rescinded COVID-related orders that relaxed specific procedural requirements during the pandemic in a sign that the Supreme Court is slowly returning to regular business.
2. The Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina ordered the Commission for Concessions of Bosnia and Herzegovina to resolve disputes between Bosnia and Herzegovina and the R.S. entity regarding the awarding of concessions for the construction of hydropower plants on the Drina River. The Party of Democratic Action (SDA) stated that the decision confirms that concessions fall under the competence of the state.
3. The Ukrainian Supreme Court has canceled a decree of President Volodymyr Zelensky on the abolition of the appointment of Oleksandr Tupytsky as a judge of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine.
4. Spain’s strict national lockdown during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic last year was ruled unconstitutional by Spain’s Constitutional Court on Wednesday.
5. The Ukrainian language law has been ruled constitutional by the Constitutional Court of Ukraine on 14 July. The court reviewed the law after 51 lawmakers, most of whom belong to the 44-member pro-Russian faction Opposition Platform — For Life faction, alleged that the law discriminates against ethnic minorities, including Russian speakers.

In the News

1. The German Federal Court of Justice temporarily establishes an auxiliary panel for so-called “diesel cases” due to the persistently high number of incoming legal disputes about claims for damages from unlawful acts, which are the subject of an inadmissible defeat device in a motor vehicle with a diesel engine.
2. The Presidential Commission on the U.S. Supreme Court reconvened on Tuesday to hear from a new set of experts on various ideas for Supreme Court reform. President Joe Biden appointed the 36-member commission to write a report on various court-reform options.
3. The German Federal President has appointed presiding judge at the Regional Court Dr. Christian Voigt as a judge at the Federal Court of Justice.
4. Poland’s Senate endorsed a human rights lawyer on Wednesday as the nation’s next ombudsman, ending months of political tug-of-war over the sensitive position.
5. Nepal’s newly-appointed PM Sher Bahadur Deuba took the oath of office and secrecy on 13 July, a day after a five-member Constitutional Bench of the Supreme Court reinstated the dissolved House of Representatives for the second time in five months.

New Scholarship

1. Peter Conti-Brown, Yair Listokin, and Nicholas R. Parrillo, Towards an Administrative Law of Central Banking, Yale Journal on Regulation, volume 38:1 (2021) (presenting the first effort to map the contours of what administrative law should mean for the Federal Reserve, with particular attention to the processes the Fed should follow in determining and announcing legal interpretations and major policy changes)
2. E. Donald Elliott and Daniel C. Esty, The End Environmental Externalities Manifesto: A Rights-Based Foundation for Environmental Law, NYU Environmental Law Journal, volume 29.3 (Forthcoming 2021) (arguing that the goal for the next stage of U.S. environmental law should be to internalize environmental externalities to the maximum extent feasible. The authors argue that this goal rather than benefit-cost analysis or economic efficiency – should be the guiding principle for the environmental law of the future, based on the natural law and philosophical principle that members of a community have an ethical obligation not to harm one another)
3. Anika Singh Lemar, Overparticipation: Designing Effective Land Use Public Processes, Fordham Law Review (Forthcoming, 2021) (critically examining how public participation operates in land use planning and approvals, and then proposing a new model, drawing lessons from other administrative processes, in an effort to balance public input, legal standards, and expertise)
4. Adam Chilton, Justin Driver, Jonathan S. Masur, and Kyle Rozema, Assessing Affirmative Action’s Diversity Rationale, Columbia Law Review Vol. 122, No. 2 (Forthcoming, 2022) (Conduct an empirical study of student-run law reviews to assess the diversity rationale. The authors investigate whether the citations to articles that a given law review publishes change after adopting a diversity policy. They find that law reviews that adopt diversity policies see the median citations to their volumes increase by roughly 23 percent in the five years after adoption)
5. David L. Sloss, Sovereignty and National Constitutions, University of St. Thomas Law Journal, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2021) (demonstrating that the sovereigntist model of constitutional law is descriptively inaccurate, arguing that the national constitutions of most countries in the world bear striking similarities to each other because those constitutions are products of transnational forces that shape the processes of drafting and interpreting constitution)
6. Stephane Dion, “Democracy against Unilateral Secession” in “Across Boundaries: Essays in Honour of Robert A.Young”, McGill-Queen’s University Press (2021) (explaining why democratic states manifestly dislike secession; more precisely, why international law, which has been largely shaped by western democracies, does not recognize a positive right to secession outside of colonial context; and finally, why the vast majority of democratic states consider themselves indivisible and do not recognize unilateral secession)
7. Juan C. Herrera and Marie-Christine, Policy brief: Control de convencionalidad en los parlamentos de los Estados parte del Sistema Interamericano de Derechos Humanos, Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (2021)
8. Mark Fathi Massoud, Shari’a, Inshallah, Cambridge University Press (2021) (demonstrating how religion builds constitutionalism and the rule of law, based on extensive historical research and fieldwork in Somali areas of Africa)
9. Law-making in illiberal regimes, a special issue of the Theory and Practice of Legislation journal (2021) (examining the inter-relationship between illiberal tendencies in government and the law-making process. Investigating whether illiberal states show evidence of a particular type of law-making process and whether certain types of the law-making process make it easier to have illiberal tendencies in government)

Calls for Papers and Announcements

1. The Danish Refugee Council (DRC) is looking for an intern to support the advocacy efforts towards Brussels-based decision-makers. The closing date for applications is Sunday, 15 August 2021.
2. Ghent University, the Human Rights Center, Programme for Studies on Human Rights in Context invites applications for a workshop ‘CAPTURED BY THE PAST: MONUMENTS. CONFLICTS. LAW’ to be held on 21 January 2022. The abstracts should be sent by 25 September 2021. The workshop is a part of the MSC-IF research project ‘To Destroy or to Preserve? Monuments, Law and Democracy in Europe’ (MELoDYE).
3. The International Nuremberg Principles Academy (Nuremberg Academy) announces that the registration for the Nuremberg Forum 2021 is now open. The Nuremberg Forum is an annual international conference organized by the Nuremberg Academy. It brings together leading scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and civil society and provides a forum for dialogue and critical exchange on contemporary international criminal law matters.
4. The Utrecht Centre for Regulation and Enforcement in Europe (RENFORCE) at the Utrecht University School of Law is hiring a postdoctoral researcher in the field of shared rule-making and enforcement in Europe. To apply, please send your curriculum vitae, including a letter of motivation, here.
5. University of Illinois College of Law invites applications for positions on the tenured/tenure-track faculty to begin in August 2022. The College welcomes applications from scholars in all subject areas of the law. The application deadline is 1 October 2021
6. La Rivista NAD. Nuovi Autoritarismi e Democrazie: Diritto, Istituzioni, Società invites the submission of essays, case notes, reviews for its upcoming issue. The new issue will contain a special section on academic freedom from a comparative and multidisciplinary perspective. The contributions may concern the legal, political, historical, and cultural profiles of academic freedom in different systems, be they authoritarian, fragile, or consolidated democracy. More information is found here.

Elsewhere Online

1. Monica Bergamo, Professor da UFMG lança livro sobre erosão constitucional no Brasil, Folha de S. Paulo
2. Isabela Cruz, “A ultra-direita cooptou o debate sobre ativismo judicial”, Nexo
3. Fernando Travesí, Repairing the Past: What the United States Can Learn from the Global Transitional Justice Movement, ICTJ
4. Joseph Geng Akech, Reflecting on the South Sudan we want: 10 years on after independence, AfricLaw
5. Orville Schell, Life of the Party: How Secure Is the CCP?, Foreign Affairs
6. Eric Singerman, The Supreme Court Injects Partisan Politics Into Independent Agencies, npr
7. Leonid Sirota, The U.K. Way, Double Aspect