The letters sent by the English composer Michael Tippett from Wormwood Scrubs Prison, where, a conscientious objector, he spent two months in summer 1943, form a remarkable and important sequence, illuminating not only Tippett's life and compositions but the experience of a gaoled objector to the Second World War. Four prison letters had been thought to survive, documenting in detail his imprisonment, which included turning pages for Benjamin Britten during a recital in the chapel, and conducting the prison orchestra. In 2023 a fifth letter was found, its discovery reported in the national press.1 Its publication is intended to complement the previously released documents, completing what is now a series of five until such time as a collected edition of Tippett's letters, of which only a fifth has seen print, can be undertaken.2

The year 2024 marks an important double anniversary for the journal The Americas. On the one hand, it marks 80 years of publication, with the first issue dated July 1944. On the other, it marks the quincentenary of the arrival of the first Franciscans to North America, when the first group of missionary friars landed in what is now Mexico. The history of the journal is rooted in the Franciscan Order. In April 1944 Franciscan historians from throughout North America met in Washington, DC, and founded the Academy of American Franciscan History. The goal of the Academy, as articulated in the records of that inaugural meeting is to “discover and assemble documents and books of Franciscan interest, to compile a complete bibliographical index of American Franciscana, to edit and publish documents, and to issue original historical works.”1 The Academy additionally pledged to publish a journal, a quarterly review of inter-American cultural history: The Americas.

Art librarians work with images. It’s one of the things that separates us from many of our fellow subject librarians. As the academy continues to grapple with the benefits, drawbacks, and effects of AI, art librarians are uniquely positioned to teach students how to critically engage with AI image generators. Considerations concerning copyright, bias in datasets, formal analysis, and AI image generators’ potential as an art medium are some examples of topics that art librarians have at their disposal.

We prove Chai's conjecture on the additivity of the base change conductor of semiabelian varieties in the case of Jacobians of proper curves. This includes the first infinite family of non-trivial wildly ramified examples. Along the way, we extend Raynaud's construction of the Néron lft-model of a Jacobian in terms of the Picard functor to arbitrary seminormal curves (beyond which Jacobians admit no Néron lft-models, as shown by our more general structural results). Finally, we investigate the structure of Jacobians of (not necessarily geometrically reduced) proper curves over fields of degree of imperfection at most one and prove two conjectures about the existence of Néron models and Néron lft-models due to Bosch–Lütkebohmert–Raynaud for Jacobians of general proper curves in the case of perfect residue fields, thus strengthening the author's previous results in this situation.

The Court of Justice of the European Union (the Court) has famously sought to eliminate intra-European Union (EU) investment arbitration under bilateral investment treaties and the multilateral Energy Charter Treaty. In doing so, the Court has navigated settled case law concerning commercial arbitration. In this regard, Achmea and subsequent rulings are premised upon a distinction drawn by the Court between investment and contract-based arbitration, based on the origin of arbitral proceedings and the intensity of the review of the relevant award. This article demonstrates that this distinction disregards important commonalities and the diversity of enforcement regimes. It is further argued that, even in the light of Achmea, EU law rightly permits intra-EU arbitration under investment contracts, that is, contracts between States and foreign investors. The article thus examines investment contract-based arbitration as the only surviving form of intra-EU investment arbitration and cautions against expansive applications of the Achmea reasoning to contractual agreements, signs of which are already emerging.

The International Law Commission (Commission or ILC) held its seventy-fifth session at its seat in Geneva from April 15 to May 31 and from July 1 to August 2, 2024. The Commission was chaired by Mr. Marcelo Vázquez-Bermúdez (Ecuador), and for the first time since its establishment in 1945, elected a majority of three females out of the five officers elected to its bureau annually. The Commission celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary and progressed its work on the topics in the program of work despite the shortening of the twelve-week General Assembly approved session to ten weeks due to the liquidity crisis facing the United Nations. Following the resignation of two of its members, one upon his election to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the other for personal reasons, the Commission elected two new members from Romania and China to fill the casual vacancies that arose as a result.

Stephen Yablo suggested that the relation of mental properties to physical properties is the same as that between red and scarlet: one of determinable property to determinate property. So just as being scarlet is a specific way of being red, on Yablo’s proposal a subject’s having a certain neurological property (c-fibres firing, say) is a specific way of a subject’s having a certain mental property (pain, in this case). I explain the virtues of this theory, in particular as defended and developed by Jessica Wilson, but raise some problems for it. I then describe a novel theory of the mental/physical relationship, which inverts the Yablo-Wilson proposal. On this theory mental properties, notably phenomenal properties – or, as I will say, qualia – are determinates of determinable physical properties. I explain the virtues of this view, and argue that they at least match, and plausibly exceed, those of the Yablo-Wilson theory. In particular, this new theory is able to account for certain prominent perplexities of the mind/body problem that tend to go unexplained. I distinguish the view from nearby theories, in particular the increasingly popular ‘Russellian monism’. I end by likening it to a recent interpretation of Aristotle’s philosophy of mind due to David Charles.