What’s New in Public Law

—Mohamed Abdelaal, Assistant Professor, Alexandria University Faculty 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. In India, the Kerala High Court has recognized the fundamental right of a woman to dignity of a mother and fairness at workplace.
2. Ukraine’s Constitutional Court has revoked a law enabling political parties to strip MPs of their mandate.
3. The Constitutional Court of South Africa is set to deliver its verdict on the impeachment case against the Country’s President.
4. The Constitutional Court of South Africa upheld the constitutionality of a university’s language policy to shift to an English medium education institution.
5. Germany’s Constitutional Court rejected a complaint against the refusal to postpone the execution of the prison sentence.

In the News

1. In Turkey, a new emergency decree extends immunity to civilians who carried out political violence defending the elected government during the failed 2016 coup.
2. Justices in Romania claimed that recent amendments to existing laws violate 14 articles of the constitution.
3. A former Peruvian President was pardoned by the current President after serving a term in prison for human rights abuses and corruption.
4. The President of Austria’s Constitutional Court criticizes tougher legislation on asylum and security measures.
5. Volkswagen petitions to the German Constitutional Court to block emissions audit.

New Scholarship

1. Karen Engle, Feminist Governance and International Law: From Liberal to Carceral Feminism, in Janet Halley, Prabha Kotiswaran, Rachel Rebouché & Hila Shamir, eds., Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field (2018) (providing an account of three distinctive feminist approaches to women’s human rights that developed from the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s)
2. Angela Huyue Zhang, Jingchen Liu, and Nuno M. Garoupa, Judging in Europe: Do Legal Traditions Matter?, J. of Comp. L. & Econ. (Forthcoming 2017) (considering the extent to which the legal origins of judges bear a statistically significant effect on case outcomes and that the rapporteur plays a crucial role in the decision-making process)
3. Gregory Ablavsky, With the Indian Tribes’: Race, Citizenship, and Original Constitutional Meanings, Stanford L. Rev. (forthcoming) (introducing the potentially important doctrinal implications for current debates in Indian law, depending on the interpretive approach applied)
4. Benjamin Plener Cover, Quantifying Partisan Gerrymandering: An Evaluation of the Efficiency Gap Proposal, 70 Stanford L. Rev. (forthcoming) (explaining how electoral districting presents a risk of partisan gerrymandering)
5. Claire R. Thomas and Ernie Collette, Unaccompanied and Excluded from Food Security: A Call for the Inclusion of Immigrant Youth Twenty Years after Welfare Reform, 31 Geo. Immigration L. Rev. 197 (2017) (advocating for immediate access to Food Stamps benefits for immigrant kids applying for and granted Special Immigrant Juvenile Status.)

Calls for Papers

1. The Brazilian Academy of International Law invites submission for the 16th Brazilian Congress of International Law to be held in the city of Foz do Iguaçu from August 22 to August 25, 2018.
2. The VU Amsterdam is organizing a Summer Course on Laws in Antiquity in July 2018.
3. A call for papers has been issued for the ‘2018 First Women Lawyers Symposium’ be held on Friday 29th June 2018, venue TBC.
4. The European Society for Comparative Legal History (ESCLH) welcomes submissions for its first Postgraduate Conference.
5. Revue Libre de Droit (“RLD”) invites submissions for a special issue on Law in Brazil.
6. Portsmouth Law School at the University of Portsmouth and the European University Institute (EUI) are organising a 2-day international conference on “Economic Constitutionalism: Mapping its Contours in European and Global Governance”. The conference will be hosted by the EUI in Florence on 14th and 15th June 2018.

Elsewhere online

1. Brian Christopher Jones, Constitutional longevity does not equal democratic success, The Hill
2. Scott Bomboy, Remembering the Supreme Court’s first dissenter, Constitution Daily
3. Anton Katz ,Replacing the President of South Africa, Daily Maverick
4. Adam Winkler, Is the Supreme Court Backsliding on LGBT Rights?, New Republic
5. Joseph Neff, No mercy for judges who show mercy, ABA Journal