Greetings from Chicago!
I arrived back in the Second City from Norway late last week—just in time to catch the US Presidential Debate on the evening of June 27, 2024. I turned it off, however, as I wasn't quite ready to leave behind the serenity of Norwegian fjords and re-enter the boiling cauldron of US politics.
IALL's 42nd Annual Course in Oslo was a resounding success. Many thanks to the Local Planning Committee, led by Rebecca J. Five Bergstrøm, for organizing such a great conference. The speakers were terrific, and I managed to snag a few of them to write papers related to their presentations, so be on the lookout for those in later IJLI issues.
I know that the attendees also enjoyed the “extra” activities, including the lovely reception at the stunning Oslo City Hall (photo at left). I had been to Oslo before, but I missed this architectural gem where the annual Nobel Peace Prize is awarded. I also thoroughly enjoyed the fascinating tour of the Norwegian Supreme Court (photo of your fearless editor below right) and the Annual Dinner, which included spectacular views of Oslo's harbor (photo below right).
Speaking of the IJLI, Cambridge University Press (CUP) is running extremely behind on the production end of things. One reason is that CUP experienced a major cybersecurity incident in early June, which caused severe disruptions to its services, including production of the IJLI. I am hopeful that CUP can get caught up before the end of the summer.
One thing that CUP did accomplish before the cyber incident was to provide electronic access to the IJLI for IALL members. Many thanks to Michael Lindsey (UC, Berkeley), IALL's webmaster, for helping coordinate this effort. If you're an IALL member and did not receive the password for accessing the IJLI, please contact me at jgrant27@uic.edu.
In this issue, I've tucked in a lot of content, with articles authored by scholars from India, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and the United States. Professors Abdumukhtor Rakhmanov, Abhishek Thommandru, and Shokhrukhbek Tillaboev have contributed an interesting piece on Islamic financial law in Central Asia. Professors Larry DiMatteo and Galyna Mykhailiuk have written about the “Modernization of Ukrainian Trademark Law: A New Generation of Protection.” A group of Ukrainian scholars has dissected the issue of military property theft during wartime, and another group from Ukraine has conducted a comparative study of the accountability of public officials for criminal offenses. From India, Professor Nidhi Sharma has expertly written about “The Ghost of Article 12 in the Indian Constitution – the Verticality v. Horizontality,” which articulates concerns about the horizontal application of fundamental rights. Several of her compatriots have written about the remedy of the Restitution of Conjugal Rights (RCR) as applied in India, and others have conducted a comparative study of sex offender registries in India and the United States.
In addition, Marci Hoffman has penned an obituary of her former colleague at UC, Berkeley—Tom Reynolds, a legendary figure in the FCIL field. I only met Tom once (at the IALL conference in Mumbai in 2007), and I learned some things about Tom in Marci's piece that I had not previously known. This issue also includes three book reviews written by Daniel Radthorne (University of Virginia School of Law). Daniel wrote these reviews in 2022, but due to an oversight, they were not published at the time. I'm happy to include them now, however.
Until issue 52.2 (Summer 2024),
