What’s New in Public Law

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—Anubhav Kumar, Advocate, Supreme Court of India & Researcher at Bar Association of India (BAI)

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Developments in Constitutional Courts

1. The German Federal Constitutional Court rejected several challenges to the provisional application of a controversial free trade agreement between the EU and Canada.
2. The Constitutional Court of Hungary annulled the ruling of the Supreme Court, according to which the government had violated the electoral procedure law by sending a newsletter to electorates at the end of February.
3. The Supreme Court of India upheld the validity of the Union Government’s decision related to “One rank one pension” for defense personnel.
4. The UK Supreme Court has refused to hear Julian Assange’s appeal to test the US diplomatic assurances not to torture him.

In the News

1. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) at Hague has ordered Russia to halt its invasion of Ukraine as the Court did not see evidence to support the Kremlin’s justification for the war.
2. A conservative federal appeals court judge, in an unusual email, urged the US Judiciary not to hire Yale Law student protesters as clerks.
3. The Chief Justice of India, N V Ramana met with HE Abdullah bin Sultan bin Awad Al Nuaimi, UAE Minister Of Justice, discussed the pending extradition orders and consular access to Indians in UAE prisons.
4. President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev proposed constitutional reforms to limit the powers of his office, including a promise to establish a Constitutional Court in Kazakhstan.
5. South African Parliamentary committee inquiry will resume its work in looking at whether there are grounds to remove Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane from office.
6. The Georgian government announced that it will sue the President in Constitutional Court over competencies and for what it perceived were breaches of constitional law.
7. The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania affirmed the state’s new legislative district maps.
8. The Ontario Court of Appeal recently dismissed the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce’s appeal of Justice Belobaba’s three decisions in Overtime Class Action Appeal.

New Scholarship

1. Laura-Stella Enonchong, Unconstitutional constitutional amendment or constitutional dismemberment? A reappraisal of the presidential term limit amendment in Cameroon (2022) (arguing that a constitutional amendment on term limits in Cameroon was a constitutional dismemberment)
2. Amanda Klassen, From Vulnerability to Empowerment: Critical Reflections on Canada’s Engagement with Refugee Policy (2022) (critically examining how the framing of refugee women as vulnerable instead of actors with the capacity to participate in policymaking has impeded progress)
3. Stephen J. Eichhorn, Resource extraction as a tool of racism in West Papua (2022) (critically examining the effects of resource extraction on cultural sustainability and presenting it as a form of racism)
4. Dimitrios Kyritsis and Stuart Lakin (eds), The Methodology of Constitutional Theory (2022) (systematically re-examining the methodology of constitutional theory in the context of the increasing polarisations in law, politics, and constitutional scholarship)
5. Jeffrey S. Sutton, Who Decides? States as Laboratories of Constitutional Experimentation (2022) (arguing that American federalism allows the states to serve as laboratories of innovation for protecting individual liberty and property rights as well as structural guarantees)
6. Aziz Z. Huq, International Institutions and Platform-Mediated Misinformation (2022) (showing how international law and institutions can mitigate or exacerbate harms to democracy from the diffusion of misinformation and hate speech on social-media platforms)
7. Tonja Jacobi & Elliot Louthen, The Corrosive Effect of Inevitable Discovery on the Fourth Amendment (2022) (examining the application of the inevitable discovery doctrine in the US)
8. David S. Law (ed), Constitutionalism in Context (2022) (providing a sweeping analysis of constitutionalism in context, its theory, methodology, pedagogy, as well as case studies)

Calls for Papers and Announcement

1. The Constitutional Court of the Republic of Indonesia is hosting 5th Indonesian Constitutional Court International Symposium (ICCIS), which will take place in Bali, on October 5-7, 2022, and is accepting papers & ideas for publication. The Theme of the Symposium is “constitutional court and conflict resolution.”
2. Department of Political Science and International Relations – University of Palermo is hosting a IAL Palermo conference on 14-15^th October 2022. More details can be accessed here.
3. Azeem Premji University in India has called for Nomination for its Advanced graduate workshop on Poverty, Globalization and Development, to be organized on July 10-23^rd, 2022. One can find the call for nomination here.
4. The Postgraduate and Early Professionals/Academics Network of the Society of International Economic Law and the University of Birmingham has called for papers for its 11th Conference of the Postgraduate and Early Professionals/Academics Network of the Society of International Economic Law to be held on 8^th -10^th June 2022.
5. The Rutgers Center for Transnational Law (United States) in partnership with The Diego Portales Public Law Program (Chile) organizes a Symposium on International Law and Constitution-Making on 18^th May 2022. One can submit their abstract before April 1, 2022, here.
6. The University of Graz is accepting proposals on the topic of digital transformation as a democratic moment for its conference UNITOPIA 2022 from May 12-14, 2022.
7. The Department of Political Science at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) invites applications for a Postdoc position in the ERC-funded research project “Reconciling Citizens with the Trade-offs of Democracy: Attitudes Toward Democracy Under Rising Politicization,” led by Professor Enrique Hernández.

Elsewhere Online

1. Conall Mallory, Beyond Fantasy Island: The British solution to the extraterritorial conundrum, U. K Constitutional Law Association
2. Deepak Raju, Ukraine v Russia: A “Reverse Compliance” case on Genocide, EJIL Talk
3. Sarah Ganty, Surrogacy as Citizenship Deprivation in S.-H. V. Poland, Strasbourg Observers
4. Joseph Geng Akech, What is in it for Them? Guarantees for Protecting Minorities Under the Constitutional Regime in South Sudan, IACL-AIDC Blog
5. Fahima Sirat, Violence Against Women: Before and After the Taliban, Oxford Human Rights Hub
6. Gautam Bhatia, Between Agency and Compulsion: On the Karnataka High Court’s Hijab Judgment, Indian Constitutional Law and Philosophy
7. Allison Alexy, Japanese family law must change, East Asia Forum
8. Mikhail Sokolov, Are Russian Academics Liberal, Open Democracy
9. Padmini Subhashree, Code Red: Decoding the latest IPCC climate risk report, The Analysis
10. Omphemetse S Sibanda, The Poisoned Chalice of a Judge-Led Inquiry into State Capture, African Law Matters