The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has tested the response capacity of the international community. This article analyses the due diligence principle and the various international legal instruments that restate it in an assessment of the possible actions that states could have taken to avoid or, at least, contain the initial outbreak of the pandemic.

The Security Council of the United Nations (UN) has long been unable to effectively discharge its duties under the UN Charter to maintain international peace and security. Its composition is problematic; it has revealed itself to be entirely inappropriate in terms of democracy and representation and it no longer responds to power dynamics in the international community. The UN General Assembly recognises the problem as it stated in Decision 74/569 of 31 August 2020. And several UN members have grouped together to provide alternative proposals for a reform of the Security Council. This article evaluates the most relevant submissions to the Open-ended Working Group on the Question of Equitable Representation on and Increase in the Membership of the Security Council and Other Matters Related to the Security Council and submits a hybrid proposal that, incorporating the more salient features from the rest, should ¿ the article argues ¿ garner the widest possible political acceptance by members.

The principle of the primacy of the law of the European Union (EU) establishes that, where the law of the EU conflicts with the laws of its Member States (MSs), the law of the EU takes precedence over the laws of the MSs. This article evaluates the doctrinal status of the principle of primacy in response to the press release of the Court of Justice of the European Union (European 2020, which breached the principle. It argues that respect of the absolute and exclusive, final jurisdiction of the ECJ under Article 267 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) is - to quote from the press release - 'the only way of ensuring' the supremacy of EU law and also the direct effect and equality of EU law.

This Article analyses the preliminary reference procedure under Article 158(3) of the Hong Kong Basic Law and its transplantation from Article 267 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. Preliminary reference procedures require courts of final appeal to refer certain questions of law to a higher legal authority for determination before they can give judgement. This Article argues that this area of Hong Kong constitutional law is underdeveloped, due in large part to the unwillingness of the Hong Kong judiciary to respect the interests of the national legislature. An examination of the preliminary reference procedure, as practiced in the E.U., makes clear that the constitutional order in Hong Kong must do more to balance regional and national interests. To that end, this Article recommends several reforms: 1) to eliminate the existing jurisprudence regarding Article 158(3) of the Basic Law; 2) to adopt E.U.-style doctrines of judicial economy, including irrelevant question, acte éclairé, and acte clair; 3) to adopt a doctrine of sincere cooperation, so as to increase the quality and quantity of judicial references; and 4) to modernize the concept of Hong Kong law to a hybrid system of common law and Chinese law.

This chapter outlines the judicial history of the federal market of Australia¿the Commonwealth of Australia¿through the role of the High Court of Australia (High Court) in the constitutionalisation of free trade in that non-unitary market jurisdiction. It analyses the shift of Australia¿s constitutional court from an interpretive theory of free trade as a right to an interpretive theory of free trade as a principle. The chapter translates this historical exercise into a call against discrimination in market access on the argument that freedom of trade can, as a constitutional norm of non-discrimination, implement a scheme of political economy to integrate separate market jurisdictions for the greater equity of all market actors. The idea at the core of this argument is that of trade without barriers.