What’s New in Public Law

–Angélique Devaux, Cheuvreux Notaires, Paris, France, Diplômée notaire, LL.M. Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law 

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 contact.iconnect@gmail.com.

Developments in Constitutional Courts

1. The Constitutional Court of South Africa found that judges have an obligation to make sure that evictions will not let people homeless, and to take informed consent into account when granting an eviction order.
2. The French Constitutional Council upheld the end of life bill.
3. German Constitutional court ruled nuclear fuel tax unconstitutional.
4. The US Supreme Court ruled in favor of several hospitals in a case that examined whether Advocate Health Care must follow a federal law designed to protect employee pensions.
5. The European Court of Human Rights found the 2011 Russian election of Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 to the Convention, which guarantees the right to free elections. The election, in which President Vladimir Putin’s party, United Russia retained majority was compromised in recount.

In the News

1. The Parliament of Navarra calls for a referendum on monarchy [article in Spanish].
2. The National Diet of Japan passed a one-off bill to allow Emperor Akihito to abdicate.
3. The Superior Electoral Tribunal in Brazil voted 4-3 against annulling the result of the election, which leaves President Michel Temer in office. The electoral tribunal rejected charges he accepted illegal campaign donations during the 2014 presidential election.
4. Georgia seeks to remove mandatory military service from the Constitution.
5. The French President Emmanuel Macron wants to end the state of emergency but wants also to integrate anti-terrorism powers into common law. A state of emergency was declared following the November 2015 Paris attacks and should expire in November 2017, after five extensions.
6. The Texas Governor signed a series of abortion regulations into law.
7. The European Court of Justice may rule on the UK Investigatory Powers Act. Judges are to decide whether the intelligence services’ bulk collection of email data in order to prevent terrorist attacks is legal.  

New Scholarship

1. Antonia Baraggia, Italian Electoral Law: A Story of an Impossible Transition?, 16 Election Law Journal (2017 forthcoming) (examining electoral reforms in Italy since 1993 until today)
2. Yaniv Roznai, Negotiating the Eternal: The paradox of entrenching secularism in constitutions, Michigan State Law Review (2017) (examining the practice of eternal protection of the principle of secularism in national constitutions)
3. Carl Goodman, The Threat to Japanese Democracy: The LDP Plan for Constitution Introduce Emergency Powers, 15 The Asia Pacific Journal (2017) (explaining why the Abe administration’s emergency powers proposal will likely be the cutting edge of its attempt to amend the Japanese Constitution, and assessing the consequences of such an amendment for Japan’s democracy)
4. Tom Ginsburg, Constitutional Advice and Transnational Legal Order, 2 UC Irvine Journal of International, Transnational and Comparative Law (2017) (surveying the history and practice of providing outside constitutional advice in constitution-making and the transnational nature of the process)
5. Vincenzo Zeno-Zencovich, Comparative Legal Systems: A Short Introduction, Roma TrE-Press (2017 forthcoming) (examining Western legal systems in a holistic perspective)
6. John Varghese, Financial Regulation and The Courts: A Comparative study of Judicial Approach in India, The United States of America, and the United Kingdom (2017) (providing a comparative study of the judiciary’s approach to regulation of financial instruments and derivatives in particular in three jurisdictions)
7. Francesco Duranti, Constitution of Tunisia, Venice Commission and International Constitutionalism, in Loretta Dell’Aguzzo and Emidio Diadato (eds.), The State of pivot states in south-eastern Mediterranean: Turkey, Egypt, Israel, and Tunisia after the Arab Spring (2017) (examining the involvement of the Venice Commission in the Tunisian constitution-making process)

Calls for Papers and Announcements

1. Melbourne Law School calls for applications for two PhD scholarships to undertake a higher degree by research and join Professor Adrienne Stone’s Laureate Fellowship Program in Comparative Constitutional Law.
2. The Croatian Yearbook of European Law and Policy invites submissions for its 2017 Volume (13). The deadline for submissions is July 1, 2017.
3. University of Illinois College of Law, the University of Bologna School of Law, and the Center for Constitutional Studies and Democratic Development invites paper proposals for the Third Annual Illinois-Bologna conference on Constitutional History: Comparative Perspectives, which will be held in Bologna, Italy, November 13–14, 2017.
4. The European Journal of Legal Studies invites submissions for the EJLS New Voices Prize. The deadline for submissions is July 1, 2017. All essays submitted after this date will be reviewed for our Summer issue. The theme of the winter issue is “Empirical Legal Studies.”

Elsewhere Online

1. Felix Mathieu, Les sources de la position de Couillard, Le Devoir [Article in French]
2. Charlie Savage, Twitter Users Blocked by Trump Seek Reprieve, Citing First Amendment, The New York Times
3. Steven D. Schwinn, Court Says Intervenors Must Have Standing of Their Own, Constitutional Law Prof Blog
4. Mario Garcia, Cautious Openness: The Spanish Constitutional Court’s Approach to EU Law in recent national case law, European Law Blog
5. Mariana Zuniga and Nick Miroff, Maduro wants to rewrite Venezuela’s Constitution. That’s rocket fuel on the fire, The Washington Post
6. Fernando José Gonçalves Acunha and Juliano Zaiden Benvindo, Democratic Decay in Brazil and the New Global Populism, Blog of the IACL, AIDC
7. Tetevi Davi, Treaty Amendments and Access to Justice at the East African Court, OxHRH
8. Meghan Campbell, A New Ground Of Discrimination: Rural Remoteness?, OxHRH
9. Mark Elliot, Does the Salisbury convention apply during a hung Parliament?, Public Law for Everyone
10. Pierre de Vos, No, there is no duty on us to presume someone is innocent until proven guilty, Constitutionally Speaking
11. Praharsh Johorey, Decoding the WhatsApp/Privacy Case, Indian Constitutional Law and Philosophy
12. Radost Zaharieva, The politics of being Roma in France, openDemocracy