This article analyzes the role played by the Latin American Water Tribunal (Tribunal Latinoamericano del Agua – TRAGUA) (LAWT) in the resolution of environmental disputes over water resources. Since its inception in 1998, the LAWT has emerged as a non-governmental body with a multidisciplinary composition and a mandate based on both formal and informal sources of law, which holds public hearings in order to address water-related complaints. This article explores whether (and the ways in which) the LAWT is contributing to the resolution of environmental disputes concerning water resources. The main underlying thesis is that, whereas the traditional model for interstate dispute settlement offers only limited possibilities of redress to non-state actors (mainly individuals and groups), the LAWT provides them with the opportunity to present their demands before an environmental justice forum.

The paper proposes a unified account of the systematic polysemy of French future (FUT) that does not uniquely rely on Aktionsart. It explains the predominant preference for the temporal interpretation of FUT, appealing to the ‘future ratification hypothesis’. This is a felicity condition that can be satisfied to different degrees and among competing interpretations the one that satisfies it to the highest degree is preferred. The paper also shows that FUT does not convey uncertainty at utterance time (tu ), and can be used when the attitude holder knows at tu that the embedded proposition is true.

Mental health acts allow for interference with the liberty of the individual. As such, they serve as test cases for theories of liberty, and thus the question of what Mill would think about them arises. My aim is to answer this question. I argue that Mill would embrace mental health acts to protect mentally disturbed individuals from themselves and others from them, and that they should have broad admission criteria, allow capable patients to refuse treatment, and have treatment decisions made by patients or their families on the basis of substituted judgements rather than representatives of the state acting on best interest judgements. This interpretation will show that many writers who claim Mill's support cannot properly do so. It is also a combination of views that cannot be readily found in mental health acts themselves, but which, as Mill's reasons for it show, is a serious candidate for legislative adoption.

This article examines the seemingly dichotomous linguistic processes of transmission and diffusion (Labov, 2007) in the regional variety of French spoken in Béarn, southwestern France. Using a sociophonetic apparent time methodology, an analysis of nasal vowel quality provides evidence for the advancement of linguistic changes from below taking place between successive generations during the transmission process, as well as for change from above taking place in the variety as a result of exposure to diffusing non-local varieties of French. The results address Labov's (2007) assertion that it is rare to investigate incremental changes occurring from below in European dialectological studies and shed light on the transmission–diffusion interface by showing the adoption of an individual change from above to instigate a faithfully-transmitted counterclockwise chain shift in the regional French nasal vowel system.

Given that a person's death is bad for her, when is it bad? I defend subsequentism, the view that things that are bad in the relevant way are bad after they occur. Some have objected to this view on the grounds that it requires us to compare the amount of well-being the victim would have enjoyed, had she not died, with the amount she receives while dead; however, we cannot assign any level of well-being, not even zero, to a dead person. In the population ethics literature, many philosophers have argued along similar lines that bringing someone into existence can neither harm nor benefit her. Working within the comparative framework (on which harms make us worse off), I respond by proposing a good sense in which we can say that dead people, and actual people at alternatives in which they do not exist, have a well-being level of zero.

Morphological marking of negation through verbal reduplication and tone is a typologically rare phenomenon attested in Eleme (Niger-Congo; Nigeria). Using Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) and Paradigm Function Morphology (PFM) to model first-hand data, I argue that reduplication is not a direct exponent of negation in Eleme, but an asemantic morphomic process, indirectly associated with the presence of a negative polarity feature in LFG’s m(orphological)-structure. While negative verb forms of this kind are typologically unusual, the data can be explained by independently motivated morphology-internal principles. The empirical facts thereby provide support for an m-structure, characterised by its own principles and rules, which interfaces with a bifurcated lexicon that separates content from form.

It has been argued by several philosophers that a morally motivated rational agent who has to make decisions under conditions of moral uncertainty ought to maximize expected moral value in his choices, where the expectation is calculated relative to the agent's moral uncertainty. I present a counter-example to this thesis and to a larger family of decision rules for choice under conditions of moral uncertainty. Based on this counter-example, I argue against the thesis and suggest a reason for its failure – that it is based on the false assumption that inter-theoretical comparisons of moral value are meaningful.

It is plausible to think that there exist acts of supererogation (acts that are morally optional and morally better than the minimum that morality demands). It also seems plausible that there is a close connection between what we are morally required to do and what it would be morally good to do. Despite being independently plausible these two claims are hard to reconcile. My aim in this article will be to respond to a recent solution to this puzzle proposed by Dale Dorsey. Dorsey's solution to this problem is to posit a new account of supererogation. I will argue that Dorsey's account fails to succeed in achieving what an account of supererogation is supposed to achieve.

This article offers a new theory about how using lotteries to distribute scarce benefits satisfies beneficiaries' claims. In the first section of the article I criticize John Broome's view and on the basis of these criticisms set out four desiderata for a philosophically adequate account of claim satisfaction by lottery. In section II I propose and defend a new view called the dual structure view, so called because it posits that claimants have two types of claims in the relevant scarce benefit distribution cases under discussion. This view meets all the desiderata set out in section I. Section III draws out the practical implications of my view for a variety of temporally extended cases, including the distribution of corneas to patients who have suffered corneal degeneration.

This article discusses how residents of early twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, defined vagrancy. Commentators on the 1890 Penal Code sought to explain the terms of the article related to vagrancy, article number 399, and its application. Evaristo de Moraes, a lawyer, essayist, and public intellectual at that time, similarly dedicated several works to this topic, as did journalists and literary writers who worked in the press. But these debates in the lettered realm were not isolated from the views and actions of average citizens, a phenomenon that one can observe by reading the criminal proceedings against women who were arrested for repeat offenses against anti-vagrancy laws. In the interventions and arguments of the accused and their defenders, it is possible to observe how vagrancy took on new meanings and how, over the course of time, the relationship between these women and the world of work evolved.