This article argues that post-syntactic feature insertion is insufficiently motivated at present and should therefore not yet be accepted as a morphological process within the theory of Distributed Morphology. Post-syntactic feature insertion has been proposed for Nimboran verbal morphology (Noyer 1998), Kiowa agreement prefixes (Harbour 2003a), Leísta Spanish doubled clitics (Nevins 2007), and Romanian gender agreement (Farkas 1990). I show that these datasets can be analysed without invoking post-syntactic feature insertion, and discuss what a dataset would have to look like to motivate it. Such a dataset would have a number of parallel circumstances, each with a true elsewhere exponent and a specific environment in which another exponent behaved like an elsewhere one, exponing two feature bundles that are the polar inverse of each other. A theory of morphology that does not allow for post-syntactic feature insertion predicts such data to be impossible.

Legislation combating discrimination is oftentimes criticized for its individual focus. Beyond this, the involvement of bystanders to instances of discrimination is increasingly receiving attention. When bystanders intervene, they risk being subjected to adverse consequences. This Article argues from recognition-based, prioritarian, and pluralist theoretical perspectives that they should be protected against these consequences. Therefore, there is a need for legal recognition and protection of these individuals. The Article then positions the bystander within the current European and Belgian discrimination legislation, discussing the legal protection against retaliation and the concept of associative discrimination. The final part of the Article compares the legal doctrinal analysis with the theoretical insights.

Investigators are often interested in how a treatment affects an outcome for units responding to treatment in a certain way. We may wish to know the effect among units that, for example, meaningfully implemented an intervention, passed an attention check or demonstrated some important mechanistic response. Simply conditioning on the observed value of the post-treatment variable introduces problematic biases. Further, the identification assumptions required by several existing strategies are often indefensible. We propose the treatment reactive average causal effect (TRACE), which we define as the total effect of treatment in the group that, if treated, would realize a particular value of the relevant post-treatment variable. By reasoning about the effect among the “non-reactive” group, we can identify and estimate the range of plausible values for the TRACE. We demonstrate the use of this approach with three examples: (i) learning the effect of police-perceived race on police violence during traffic stops, a case where point identification may be possible; (ii) estimating effects of a community policing intervention in Liberia, in communities that meaningfully implemented it; and (iii) studying how in-person canvassing affects support for transgender rights, among participants for whom the intervention would result in more positive feelings toward transgender people.

In an era of globalization, incumbents face strong incentives to attribute poor economic performance to external actors. While motivated reasoning explains how partisans update blame toward domestic incumbents, it remains unclear whether such blame is genuinely redirected to external actors beyond voters’ political control. Moreover, externalizing blame may signal limits to democratic accountability, with potential consequences for democratic belief. This article advances an asymmetric blame-shifting argument and tests it with two pre-registered survey experiments conducted on Amazon MTurk following the 2022 US midterm elections (n = 802; n = 999). Exploiting President Joe Biden’s attribution of rising inflation to Vladimir Putin, the experiments show that blame-shifting cues polarize partisan evaluations of the domestic incumbent: Democrats reduce blame toward Biden, while Republicans intensify it. In contrast, blame attribution toward the external actor remains largely unchanged across both studies. Study 2 further provides limited but suggestive evidence that exposure to external blame narratives may weaken democratic belief among opposition partisans. Together, the findings indicate that elite blame-shifting operates asymmetrically, which intensifies domestic partisan polarization without redistributing blame across borders, and such asymmetry may further erode democratic legitimacy.

We construct an R&D-based growth model in which the government can reduce income taxes using seigniorage, that is, revenue from issuing new money. Using this model, we analytically derive the growth rate of the nominal money stock that maximizes welfare and show explicitly how the welfare-maximizing money growth rate depends on the parameters of the economy. In particular, the results show that stronger patent protection lowers the welfare-maximizing money growth rate. Therefore, lower inflation is preferred in countries with stronger patent protection. This theoretical result is consistent with the observed tendency for the inflation rates to be lower in developed countries, where patent protection is stronger than in developing countries.

The international community is not on track to achieve the Paris Agreement’s objectives. Global temperatures have already risen by more than 1.3°C, and greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase year after year. Nevertheless, the IPCC asserts that staying within the safe threshold remains achievable. Against this backdrop, and in light of the recent ICJ Advisory Opinion on the Obligation of States in respect of Climate Change, this paper examines the content and legal nature of the Paris Agreement’s long-term temperature goal. First, it analyses whether the legal threshold should be set at 1.5°C or 2°C. Second, by interpreting the Paris Agreement within the framework of international law, it identifies this temperature objective as the treaty’s object and purpose. Consequently, Article 2(1)(a) assumes a critical interpretive role. Moreover, drawing inspiration from Articles 18 and 26 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, this article upholds that states have an obligation to refrain from acts that would defeat this collective goal. Contrary to traditional perspectives, this article argues that this obligation applies both before and after the treaty’s entry into force. This commitment is characterized as an integral obligation of due diligence.

We studied conservation initiatives in Wallacea, a global biodiversity hotspot where numerous endemic plant and animal species are threatened by agricultural and industrial expansion. Seventy per cent of Wallacea’s 391 recognized Key Biodiversity Areas lie outside legally protected habitats. Our research explores biodiversity conservation options in six highly biodiverse landscapes where local farmers actively manage production systems subject to overlapping administrative jurisdictions and exposed to intensifying development pressures. For the past decade we have engaged with local communities in these landscapes to identify scenarios that could meet their development needs and also maintain the region’s biodiversity. Conservation management will need local institutions able to influence the behaviour of numerous local stakeholders. We conclude that there is a need to provide financial incentives to local people for conservation either through profitable nature-based enterprises adapted to local community skills or by providing conditional cash payments linked to conservation goals. Ecosystem boundaries do not align well with administrative jurisdictions and new institutional arrangements will be needed to meet the goals of the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

Organizational actors face multiple paradoxical tensions that are not only intertwined with one another but also nested across different levels of the organizational hierarchy. Despite their importance, little is known about how such paradoxical tensions are interpreted and managed by organizational leaders. To explore this phenomenon, we conducted semi-structured interviews and collected multilevel data from 38 respondents, including corporate executives, team leaders, and managers in the Pakistani telecommunications sector. Through an interpretive phenomenological analysis of participants’ lived experiences, we developed a multilevel nested paradox model. This model revealed four paradoxes nested both within and across levels: task efficiency and employee well-being, individual interest versus institutional interest, ethics and profitability, and empowerment and accountability. The tensions arising from customer demands, followers’ expectations, and organizational requirements lie at the intersection of the levels occupied by followers, team leaders, and corporate executives. Our model shows that tensions at one level exacerbate tensions at other levels, and through this transmission process, paradoxes generate a constellation of paradoxes. The study’s model suggests that leaders manage these nested tensions by applying a combination of splitting and integration strategies, dynamically sequencing and distributing responses across levels. This study contributes to the underexplored research on paradox multiplicity and deepens the understanding of paradoxes as a meta-theory. We also highlight several important theoretical and practical implications of this research.

We investigate the dynamics arising from an idealized model of a spherical active particle immersed in a cubic Poiseuille field inspired by fluid flow through an equilateral triangular duct. Starting from a general Hamiltonian formulation, we describe the equations of motion, analyse equilibrium points and their stability and classify trajectories based on their initial position. Motion of an active particle within the Poiseuille flow of an equilateral triangular duct is an interesting case to examine given its symmetry group and a velocity field described by a cubic polynomial. In addition to trajectory types previously identified in other duct geometries, including central and vertical swinging, tumbling, off-centred trapping and wandering, we observe some exotic orbits within the triangular geometry. We also examine the chaotic behaviour by using Poincaré maps and Lyapunov exponents over a range of parameter values and initial conditions. This work enhances the broader understanding of idealized microswimmer motion via a case where the fluid flow has a straightforward closed-form description.

We experimentally investigate preferences for clumping-versus-separating information in the gain and the loss domains, and also preferences for timing. Our design is motivated by the idea that information preferences may depend on reference points. Subjects participate in two monetary lotteries and choose how to receive the outcome information. For half of the subjects, the lotteries are framed as two gain lotteries; for the other half, as two loss lotteries. Based on Thaler (1985) one can expect that people want to learn the outcomes of the gain lotteries separately and the outcomes of the loss lotteries clumped together (cf. hedonic editing hypothesis). On the other hand, a different reference dependent model by Koszegi and Rabin (2009) relies on expectations-based reference points, and predicts that subjects should prefer clumped information irrespective of the frame.

The results of our experiment show a preference for separating information about gains, and no preference for clumping or separating information about losses. Regarding timing, we find a weak overall preference for receiving information sooner. These findings provide new insights into information preferences. We conclude by discussing policy implications, as well as our additional contributions to related literature.

This article proposes to centre economic inequality when introducing trusts to law students. The subject is reputedly tedious and gruelling. This can only be compounded, as economic inequality intensifies, by the experiential distance between underprivileged students and the world of trusts. Yet their career prospects, and potential contributions to reducing inequality, can benefit from understanding trusts. The need to engage students in learning the subject, therefore, warrants attention. This article offers a four-step method aimed at promoting engagement by introducing the subject within the context of the familiar social problem of drastic economic inequality. It constructs this method by drawing from Roger Cotterrell’s critical and socio-legal consciousness about trusts.

Substantial pits of Mesolithic date are being recognised with ever greater frequency in lowland Britain and adjacent regions of continental Europe. Often without associated artefactual or faunal assemblages, but containing complex fill sequences, the purpose of these pits has proved difficult to establish. Here, we present the results of excavation on what is to date the largest cluster of substantial Mesolithic pits discovered in the British Isles, at Linmere, Houghton Regis, Bedfordshire. An important assemblage of faunal material was recovered from the pits. This, the morphology of the features, their landscape setting adjacent to a spring-fed stream system, and analogy with other large pit systems, are used to support an argument that these were pit-fall traps used in the hunting of the largest herbivores of the time: aurochs (wild cattle). Aggregation and feasting are implied by the character of this activity. Recuts in the partially silted pits, often containing deposits of animal bone, are linked to notions of spiritual reciprocity and commemoration. The creation and subsequent engagement with these pits is seen as tied into the construction and maintenance of social relations at scale (though gathering and consumption), along with matters of place-making, and relationship work with animals and spirits/meta-persons.

Contemporary accounts of Mithraism emphasize particular, shared modes of anthropogenic place-making: spaces laid out in distinctive, bench-lined arrangements, which may have been freighted with a surplus of cosmic symbolism that was actualized through the performance of ritual. Focusing on the site of Močići (Croatia), we argue that Mithraic place-making must instead be situated in a host of far more localized and material relationships that afford their own particular modes, experiences, and semiotics of worshipping the god. In the case of Močići, those relationships include local karstic geologies, particular lifeways and experiences of the landscape, and the ways that significances were woven around natural phenomena. The site encourages rethinking both contemporary conceptions of “Mithraism” and material- and place-based approaches to cult in antiquity.