What’s New in Public Law

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—Anubhav Kumar, Advocate & Researcher, Supreme Court of India 

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In this weekly feature, I-CONnect publishes a curated reading list of developments in public law. “Developments” may include links to news, high court decisions, new or recent scholarly books, 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. Supreme Court of Canada denies rehearing in R v Greater Sudbury
2. Uganda’s Constitutional Court rejects petition against anti-gay law
3. Constitutional Court summons four ministers for poll dispute hearing
4. U.S. Supreme Court Declines to Review Second Circuit Ruling That Syndicated Term Loans Are Not Securities
5. Supreme Court grants bail to AAP MP Sanjay Singh, cautions ED over ‘prima facie’ material

In the News

1. Biden denounces Florida abortion ruling as ‘outrageous’ as state vote looms
2. City of Vancouver Seeks Supreme Court of Canada Appeal on SRO Vacancy Control Decision
3. ICSID tribunal upholds Guatemala’s preliminary objection against the import of 10 umbrella clauses through an MFN clause while rejecting and joining to the merits the remaining preliminary objections raised by the state
4. No coercive steps will be taken to recover Rs 3,500 crore from Congress before end of Lok Sabha polls: I-T dept to Supreme Court
5. Thai court approves case to dissolve opposition party

New Scholarship

1. Ronald J. Krotoszynski, Jr, Free Speech as Civic Structure (Forthcoming 2024) (Challenges the widely-held assumption that fundamental rights require a text in order to be judicially protected – both in the U.S. and in the wider democratic world and  Establishes that local legal culture and institutional structure play a far more important role in the development and enforcement of free speech rules across domestic legal systems demonstrating the central importance of courts to the protection of speech in a democracy and Explores the relationship between democratic consolidation and constitutional endurance in Asia and Africa, challenging existing frameworks of understanding)
2. Michel Rosenfeld, Illiberal Constitutionalism: Viable Alternative or Nemesis of The Modern Constitutional Ideal? (2024) (Explores the question of whether illiberal constitutionalism is a viable alternative to its liberal counterpart or a pathway to authoritarianism.)
3. Conall Mallory and Hélène Tyrrell, The Extrajudicial Voice (2024) (Argues that extrajudicial communication of judges is shaped by a shared conception amongst the judicial community of what is appropriate. This conception of propriety is principally motivated by a communal pursuit of sustaining public confidence in the judicial office)
4. Neha Tripathi and Anubhav Kumar, Integrating Reproductive Justice Approaches in the Human Rights Framework: A Comparative Analysis of the U.S.A., India, and Indonesia (2024) (assessed and analyzed the status of reproductive rights in the U.S.A, India, and Indonesia through a comprehensive analysis of case laws decided by constitutional courts of these countries. The global debate on women’s reproductive rights, championed by feminists, emphasizes the urgent need to eradicate gender stereotypes for true equality. Despite progress, many countries still face challenges due to religious, cultural, and socio-economic biases.)
5. Stuart Hargreaves, The Intersection of National Security & Bilingualism in the Written Corpus of Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal (2024) (Suggests that while translation rates remain low overall, a pattern appears to be emerging in which judgments related to the National Security Law (NSL) are prioritized for translation and contends that this shows conscious decisions are being taken regarding which decisions to translate and in turn this is an implicit admission that translation matters.)

Calls for Papers and Announcement

1. DemoCrisis is hosting a conference on 17 April, 2024 at the Ministry of Justice in Warsaw under the auspices of the new Polish minister of Justice Adam Bodnar. More details here.
2. The London School of Economics (LSES) is hiring a highly-skilled and motivated individual as Research Assistant to work under the direction of Sandra Sequeira. The job will entail close collaboration on a number of new and ongoing projects on a broad range of topics in applied microeconomics, development economics and political economy, using “big data” and experimental and quasi-experimental methods to identify causal effects and test the predictions of economic models. Last date to apply is 20th April 2024. More details here.
3. The Edinburgh University is looking for a committed and enthusiastic academic to join Edinburgh Law School as an Early Career Fellow in Private Law.  This is a fixed term post available until the 31st of July 2027.  The successful candidate should have advanced subject knowledge of either family law or the law of obligations and will have either completed a PhD (or be very close to completion) in private law or have equivalent professional experience.
4. The University of Buckingham, Law School is hosting 2nd Annual International Conference on Human Rights, Sustainability and Climate Change (ICHRSCC), supported by the Global Human Rights Centre, London. As an inter-disciplinary conference, researchers, experts, scholars, postgraduate students, academics and non-academics, public commentators, policy makers, activists are invited to submit abstracts for presentation that seek to deliver key cutting-edge findings, result oriented solutions, and briefings/ experiences in practice and field work. Presenters can send full paper for publication and selected papers from conference presentation will be published in The Lord Denning Law Journal (peer reviewed).

Elsewhere Online

1. Michael C. Dorf, What’s Different About the Roberts Court, Dorf on Law.
2. Thuleleni Msomi, Tanzania’s Colonial Relic: A Thread of Capital Punishment,  Oxford Human Rights Hub.
3. Ozioma V. Nwadike, The Legal Quandary of Parallel Party Primaries in Nigeria, African Law Matters.
4. Dr. Natalie Klein & Jack McNally, Measuring Compliance and the Decisions of UNCLOS Dispute Settlement Bodies, EJIL Talk.
5. Maria Skóra & York Albrecht, Strengthening the Resilience of the Rule of Law through Democracy, Verfassungsblog.