The shortest trial report in the Old Bailey Proceedings is precisely eight words in length. In February, 1685:

This article examines public health spending, health outcomes and political complexion in London's 28 Metropolitan Borough Councils (MBCs) in the inter-war period. It describes the place of the MBCs in the governance of the capital and demonstrates the variety of experience across the different boroughs in terms of wealth, politics and mortality. Searching for potential causes of differences in outcomes, it discovers some positive statistical relationships between the extent of Labour party presence on the councils, local spending and health outcomes. Our tentative conclusion is that local democratic processes could lead to distinctive and beneficial public health policies, albeit within the context of other local and structural determining factors.

The Prosecution Project <https://prosecutionproject.griffith.edu.au/> is a large-scale digital project that aims to provide a new way of exploring the context and impact of changes in the criminal trial during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It does so from an elementary platform: the digitization of the court calendars of criminal trials in the higher courts in the six main Australian jurisdictions over time periods as long as 130 years. The objective is to address questions of the criminal justice process centered on prosecution, from arrest, committal, and indictment, to verdict, sentence, and beyond. In a field of historical research that is more often characterized by the richness of discursive analysis, the Prosecution Project's comparative data sets are designed to offer a new understanding of quantitative context over long periods of time. The challenge of building the data platform is, however, considerable, requiring significant planning, collaboration and investment by a large number of researchers, working with relevant archive repositories, and, in this case, assisted by the engagement of an interested community lying outside the regular academy. This article describes the background to the project, its development as a collaborative digital initiative, and its technical and organizational requirements and possibilities, before we explore briefly some of the research outcomes that this project makes possible.

This study investigates the hypothesis of young people having the multi-skills required to switch between formal and informal communication. We collected samples of the written output of students across different media and communication situations. The results obtained through dictation tests show that the students’ level is relatively low, with a majority of grammatical errors. The analysis of linguistic forms common to the corpora indicates that all the participants use traditional spelling in at least one of them. Lastly, we present a qualitative analysis of spelling variation and an overview of the teenagers’ linguistic representations.

In his ethnomusicological writings and lectures, Béla Bartók describes folk music as ‘a natural product, just like the various forms of animal and vegetable life’ and elaborates this view, going on to describe a collection of developmental processes modelled explicitly on biological evolution. In this article, I characterize Bartók's evolutionary model by laying bare the taxonomies and genealogies inherent in his classificatory system. Then, through an analysis of the fifth of his Eight Improvisations on Hungarian Folk Songs (1920), I suggest the outlines of a method for interpreting and analysing Bartók's music engendered from this evolutionary model, a method that involves the elaboration of two ideas: (1) a conceptual shift from a relatively historically static major/minor tonality to a multivalent, ‘evolving’ tonality, and (2) the reconception of motives or themes as having no single original forms, but rather as being related genetically, as somehow evolving in their own right.

Harsanyi claimed that his Aggregation and Impartial Observer Theorems provide a justification for utilitarianism. This claim has been strongly resisted, notably by Sen and Weymark, who argue that while Harsanyi has perhaps shown that overall good is a linear sum of individuals’ von Neumann–Morgenstern utilities, he has done nothing to establish any connection between the notion of von Neumann–Morgenstern utility and that of well-being, and hence that utilitarianism does not follow.

The present article defends Harsanyi against the Sen–Weymark critique. I argue that, far from being a term with precise and independent quantitative content whose relationship to von Neumann–Morgenstern utility is then a substantive question, terms such as ‘well-being’ suffer (or suffered) from indeterminacy regarding precisely which quantity they refer to. If so, then (on the issue that this article focuses on) Harsanyi has gone as far towards defending ‘utilitarianism in the original sense’ as could coherently be asked.

Suburbs are significant to any understanding of Australian urbanization as they have been the dominant organizational element in the morphology of metropolitan areas. A case-study of suburban growth in Adelaide, South Australia, in the period from 1850 to 1930 suggests that dominant accounts of Australian suburbs of the era, as places of tranquillity, leisure, home and family, whose growth was driven by aspiration and social mobility, are largely illusory. Suburban growth was instead driven by speculation and economic opportunity. Accounts of commercial, recreational and industrial activity in Adelaide's suburban municipalities of the time suggests economically and socially diverse communities. Whereas the desire for the quarter or half acre block in the suburbs was most often due to its productive potential rather than bourgeois aspirations for seclusion and semi-rural tranquillity.

Following a spate of anarchist bombings and assassinations in Europe, the gente decente of Guatemala City began to describe local events using the language of anarchism. The 1894 anarchist furor spoke to two tendencies that had shaped Guatemala City since the 1870s. The first was the cosmopolitan desire of the gente decente. Facilitated by cosmopolitan bridge figures, trends and fashions from Europe and especially Paris shaped the cultural lexicon of Guatemala City's elite. Secondly, the anarchist furor reflected the misgivings of the gente decente toward urban disorder and malcontents as they conflated anarchism and anarchy.

This article addresses tax avoidance by companies in the context of the emerging field of business and human rights. It describes the mechanics of corporate tax avoidance and the human costs of such practices. It then considers the extent to which tax issues have been addressed by corporate social responsibility, before turning to business and human rights and assessing the potential value of the United Nations Guiding Principles on business and human rights in this context. The article draws on the experience of Ireland, given the country’s connection to abusive tax practices associated with large multinational corporations and its support for the United Nations Guiding Principles on business and human rights.