In this paper, I explore the notion of public interest embedded in the Procurement Act 2023. I use this new piece of post-Brexit legislation as a contemporary example of the difficulty in designing a ‘public interest centred’ system of public procurement regulation. I show how a mix of partly overlapping explicit, referential, and implicit public interest goals results in a situation where there are multiple sources of objectives contracting authorities need to consider in their decision-making, but there is no prioritisation of sources or objectives. I also show that, despite this kaleidoscopic proliferation of sources and objectives, and due to the unavailability of effective means of judicial challenge or administrative oversight, contracting authorities retain almost unlimited discretion to shape the public interest and ‘what it looks like’ in relation to the award of each public contract. This challenges the centralised approach to procurement policy taken by recent and current UK Governments and, in particular, raises significant questions on the likely effectiveness of ‘mission-driven’ procurement. I close with a call to reconsider how public procurement can foster the public interest, in light of its limitations as a regulatory tool.

The USCCB statement resourcing lay ecclesial ministry relies on two biblical images; a mixed metaphor pairing an historical reality of the Pauline ecclesial co-worker and a Matthean parabolic narrative of day laborers. Examining this combined metaphor discloses how their tensions mirror the statement’s theological and pastoral divergences on the scope and authority of lay ministry leadership. The metaphor’s meaning and the statement’s text reinforce one another’s ambiguities enough that they can both highlight the vital ecclesial importance of lay ministry, or allow it to be interpreted in a clericalized way which undermines lay ministers’ value. This analysis is contextualized by pandemic-era stresses on lay ministers, even as there are new recognitions of their importance and value by Pope Francis and the synodal process. The status of these important ministers as true co-workers in the Pauline sense remains largely unrealized, highlighting the need for renewed theological and pastoral efforts to encourage their proper agency in the life of the Church.

Extant research has highlighted the impact of legal innovations on the organizational choices made by entrepreneurs and traced the diffusion of new business forms across international borders, such as the private limited liability company (PLLC). This paper uses a newly compiled database of all firms operating in Vienna between 1900 and 1936 to examine the PLLC’s impact on the Austrian business landscape following its introduction. Its findings reveal that the PLLC quickly replaced other legal forms. While suitable for a wide range of sectors, the PLLC was particularly attractive to new industries burdened by machinery investment rather than wage costs. By empirically demonstrating that the PLLC filled a critical gap in the legal framework of Austria, this study highlights the broader importance of legal forms as instruments for fostering entrepreneurial activity, shaping economic structures, and driving development.

Let $X$ be a curve of genus at least 4 that is very general or very general hyperelliptic. We classify all the ways in which a power $(JX)^k$ of the Jacobian of $X$ can be isogenous to a product of Jacobians of curves. As an application, we show that if $A$ is a very general principally polarized abelian variety of dimension at least 4 or the intermediate Jacobian of a very general cubic threefold, then no power $A^k$ is isogenous to a product of Jacobians of curves. This confirms various cases of the Coleman–Oort conjecture. We further deduce from our results some progress on the question of whether the integral Hodge conjecture fails for $A$ as above.