The long history of suicide as a criminal offence still has a significant contemporary effect on how it is perceived, conceptualised and adjudged. This is particularly the case within countries where suicide is largely determined within a coronial system, such as Australia, the UK and the US. This paper details the outcomes of a study involving semi-structured interviews with coroners both in England and Australia, as well as observations at inquests. It focuses around the widely held contention that the suicide rates produced within these coronial systems are underestimations of anywhere between 15 to 50 per cent. The results of these interviews suggest that there are three main reasons for this systemic underestimation. The first reflects the legacy of suicide as a criminal offence, resulting in the highest standard of proof for findings of suicide in the UK, and a continuing stigma attached to families of the deceased. The second is the considerable pressure brought to bear upon coroners by the family of the deceased, who, because of that stigma, commonly agitate for any finding other than that of suicide. The third involves the rise of ‘therapeutic jurisprudence’, wherein coroners take on the responsibility of the emotional well-being of the grieving families, which in turn affects the likelihood of reaching a finding of suicide. The conclusions drawn by the paper are also twofold: first – with respect to the stigma of suicide – it will take a lot more than simple decriminalisation to change deeply held social perceptions within the community. Second, given that suicide prevention programmes and policies are based on such deeply questionable statistics, targeted changes to coronial legislation and practice would appear to be required.

This paper follows collegiality, demonstrating how, as a central value of medically trained coroners, it can shape the content of death investigations and certificates. Drawing on ethnographic evidence from a 16-month-long study of the Office of the Chief Coroner (OCC) of Ontario, Canada, I argue that collegiality is an instrument of trust that both affords investigators tremendous access to information, and severely limits the flow of that information into the public domain that the OCC serves. The paper focuses on in-care death investigations, which are those where the OCC's medically qualified coroners find themselves investigating the quality of care delivered by professional colleagues. I show how professional expertise, experience and collegial values often combine to see instances of poor or even incompetent care dealt with privately (rather than publicly) or referred up the medical (rather than public safety) hierarchy. The burden of my argument is that collegial deference to the autonomy and skills of other physicians tends to see coroners expurgate the death certificates they produce. These expurgations obscure competence issues from public view and reduce the accuracy of the certificates. I close with a discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of medically qualified death investigators, as well as potential adjustments to improve the accuracy of in-care death investigations and certifications.

Lord Neuberger describes open justice as a procedural principle requiring that ‘what goes on in court and what a court decides is open to scrutiny’ (Neuberger, 2011). The prime rationale given for this principle is that it is a safety check on procedural fairness. Such a conception of open justice applies on only a superficial level in inquests into use-of-force deaths at the hands of the state. This paper examines the practice of, and rationales behind, opening up use-of-force deaths at the hands of the state to scrutiny through inquests. They suggest a primarily intrinsic rather than instrumental link between openness and inquests’ purposes, which requires a reframing of traditional conceptions of open justice in this context. It is further argued that recognition theory can provide the normative link between openness and justice in these circumstances – a link that is implicit in the term ‘open justice’ but rarely explored in inquests.

This paper examines the coronial manual as a technique of occupying office in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The manual guided coroners in the performance of their duties, obligations and responsibilities. It was preoccupied with questions of technical knowledge, operational processes and administrative procedure. The language of office that characterised coronial treatises prior to the eighteenth century was gradually supplemented in the nineteenth century by the discourse of bureaucracy. This paper argues that the guidebook professionalised the office of coroner in Australia by setting out procedures, forms and rituals for assuming responsibility for the dead. It also provided advice to coroners for devoting themselves to a vocation in the public service. The paper thus traces historical shifts in the technology of the coronial manual in British colonies and examines how a bureaucratic logic of the coroner's office affected the way in which coroners pursued justice during the death investigation process.

In 1840 the raja of Travancore, Swathi Thirunal, would offer his government's assistance to the British Association for the Advancement of Science and its plan for a global system of magnetic observations. Over the next thirty years, the two directors of this princely state's observatory, John Caldecott and John Allan Broun, would pursue fundamental terrestrial magnetic research. Their efforts would culminate in the Trivandrum [Trevandrum] Magnetical Observations (1874). In what follows, the history of this publication is used to shed light on how and why a semi-autonomous princely state such as Travancore would engage the scientific community in Europe at this time. The article focuses in particular on the work of turning observation data into a published report and on how that labour would be distributed between the Indian subcontinent and Europe. Because the production of such reports required dozens of hands and decades of labour, its history can reveal much about the concrete working relationship between informal colony and imperial metropole within the British Empire. The Trivandrum Magnetic Observations were produced within a global economy of science in which Travancore sometimes had the upper hand. At the same time, data and scientific productions tended to accumulate in Europe (at least for a time), where ultimately the consumers of scientific products and the arbiters of ‘scientific value’ also largely remained. Within the sprawling economic, political and cultural infrastructures that linked geomagnetic research in Travancore and Europe, the relative strengths and weaknesses of each region would cut in different directions. The history of the production of the Trivandrum Observations brings to light this robustly interconnected geography of scientific production within the British Empire. It also reveals some of the processes by which ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’ in the sciences were then becoming differentiated.

This paper deals with the syntax of afterthoughts in Greek under a parsing-oriented perspective. The main claim is that afterthoughts can receive a straightforward explanation once we make the assumption that afterthoughts can be seen as answers to implicit questions. A formal syntactic account based on this assumption is put forth, and its ability to deal with gender mismatches exhibited in Greek afterthoughts is shown. Afterthoughts are further discussed in a more general perspective, arguing that once we turn into a dynamic model where context re-use and update are taken to be core components of syntax, a number of issues regarding afterthoughts like connectivity effects, locality constraints, freedom of positioning and reconstruction effects can receive a straightforward explanation.

Achievements have recently begun to attract increased attention from value theorists. One recurring idea in this budding literature is that one important factor determining the magnitude or value of an achievement is the amount of effort the achiever invested. The aim of this article is to present the most plausible version of this idea. This advances the current state of debate where authors are invoking substantially different notions of effort and are thus talking past each other. While the concept of effort has been invoked in the philosophical analysis of a number of important concepts such as desert, attention, competence, and distributive justice, it has hardly ever been analysed itself. This article makes headway in this regard by discussing three ambiguities in the everyday notion of effort. It continues to develop two accounts of effort and shows how both of them are achievement-enhancing.

What if instead of studying religions by texts, history, and practices we studied them by what they fear? I first had this thought in considering philosophical differences between Plato's Republic and Laws. What accounted for the shift from the profound idealism of the Republic to the apparent authoritarianism of the Laws? The standard answer is that Plato was born in a time of troubles, at the tail end of the oligarchic regime of the Thirty Tyrants, who took hold of Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian Wars. As recounted in the Apology, it was a regime that was famously and vigorously opposed by Plato's great teacher, Socrates. Socrates is absent from Plato's last dialogue, the Laws, written as an older man, after a stint in prison for having opposed another tyrant. In the Laws, the contemplation of ideal forms in Republic gives way to promulgation of detailed laws to achieve unity, harmony, and a perhaps tenuous peace. Most imperative of all is the need to avoid the chaos of war and tyranny. The philosopher is gone—Plato has lawyered up.

In this article, we present a short case study based on an incident that occurred in Israel several years ago. The incident did not reach the courts but was made public by the family members of the older woman at the center of it. The family argued that the actions taken by one of the parties involved should have been defined as elder abuse, but no criminal charges were ever brought. Yet the issues concern key legal and ethical questions about law, religion, and older persons. More specifically, the incident raises the issue of the moral commitment to one's past religious beliefs in reference to one's current choices and preferences once living with dementia. We contend in this article that an Aristotelean account of human dignity would have provided the most satisfactory way to resolve the tensions created by this incident.

In ‘Measuring the Consequences of Rules’, Holly Smith presents two problems involving the indeterminacy of compliance, which she takes to be fatal for all forms of rule-utilitarianism. In this reply, I attempt to dispel both problems.

This article introduces a novel way in which human rights due diligence can be ‘enhanced’ to respond to business and human rights challenges specific to conflict affected areas. It makes two key arguments. First, it claims that a crucial and often neglected factor for understanding human rights risks in conflict affected areas is that businesses face escalating and largely unpredictable human rights risks once they become involved in conflict. Second, the article shows how integrating aspects of the well-established method of conflict sensitive business practice into human rights due diligence can help companies address this challenge. For instance, companies should include a conflict analysis in human rights impact assessments and systematically identify and address their actual or potential impacts on conflict. This article provides support to a UN Working Group proposal for the integration of conflict sensitive business practices into human rights due diligence.

Does doing good in itself make one a better person? This idea is intuitive yet its precise formulation underexplored. This article first shows that it is not the case that a person is good to the extent that her existence brings about good or to the extent that her actions do good. A proportional principle that evaluates a person according to the expected goodness of her actual course of action relative to the expected goodness of other available courses is shown to be the most plausible candidate. However, such a principle can only be a pro tanto principle of what makes persons good. To account for other relevant intuitions – such as that a person's motives matter for how good she is – we need further principles. This article ends with a few practical implications about how to be a better person according to the principle defended here.