English common law and United Kingdom legislation provide various – overall liberal – jurisdictional grounds for hearing foreign tort claims. The article examines these grounds with reference to recent and ongoing oil pollution nuisance litigation involving Royal Dutch Shell Plc and its Nigerian subsidiary operating in the Niger Delta. Particular attention is given to the factors taken into account by the court in exercising its discretion to allow service out of the jurisdiction in cases of pollution taking place abroad under the principle of forum non conveniens. Following the widely commented decision of the United States Supreme Court in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Corporation, which ruled against the extraterritorial application of the Alien Tort Statute, it is easy to forget that the rules of jurisdiction vary from country to country and that different legal systems apply similar concepts in often radically different ways. Attention is also given to the future development of English jurisdictional law and practice in the context of environmental nuisance.

Much has been written about the use of French in medieval England. However, with one or two exceptions, relatively little has been written about the language in early modern England. This article aims to provide an account of the use of French as an emigrant language in one of the leading provincial cities in early modern England, Norwich. From 1565 onwards thousands of people from the French-language area migrated to England as a result of economic necessity and religious persecution. Many of them settled in Norwich. As well as these immigrants and their descendants, there were Dutch immigrants in Norwich who spoke French as well as several well-educated individuals from the local English population such as Sir Thomas Browne. This article describes the varieties of French used in Norwich, including Picard, the emerging standard French and Law French. It then discusses how French operated in the multilingual environment of early modern Norwich under the headings of language competition, language contact, bilingualism, code switching, translation, and finally, language shift and recession. It adds not only to our understanding of French in early modern England but also to the literature on French as an emigrant language.

World cultural heritage is under systemic attack on several crisis fronts, most notably in Mesopotamia, where ISIS is practising a deliberate and highly sophisticated strategy of ‘cultural cleansing’. Through its newly established Task Force, Italy is leading the international community’s efforts to strengthen the protection regime by including a cultural component in the mandates of peacekeeping interventions. The Italian contribution distinguishes itself, thanks to its capacities and capabilities, in fulfilling the military, police and cultural tasks of ‘cultural peacekeeping’ and in meeting the needs of the international intervention in the crucial entry and exit phases. Moreover, Italy’s commitment to protecting cultural heritage fits perfectly with the distinctive features of Italy’s international identity and role while at the same time serving the country’s national interests by increasing its standing and visibility in world affairs.

According to the priority view, or prioritarianism, it matters more to benefit people the worse off they are. But how exactly should the priority view be defined? This article argues for a highly general characterization which essentially involves risk, but makes no use of evaluative measurements or the expected utility axioms. A representation theorem is provided, and when further assumptions are added, common accounts of the priority view are recovered. A defence of the key idea behind the priority view, the priority principle, is provided. But it is argued that the priority view fails on both ethical and conceptual grounds.

In the above mentioned article by Grieve, Nini & Guo, an error has occurred in the section numbering.

Section 4 is missing and has been mistakenly labelled with section 5. All sections and subsections labelled section 5, should be section 4. Which means section 6 should be renamed section 5.

In 1885 and 1886, two trials helped to precipitate a vigorous debate about when criminal proceedings should be closed to the public and when press reports on such cases should be restricted or banned altogether. First, the trial of the artist Gustav Graef for perjury and inappropriate relations with underage models featured sensationalized press reports that provoked a firestorm of public criticism. Soon afterward, press coverage of the trial of a Danish spy, Christian von Sarauw, revealed compromising details about German military planning and outraged government officials. The result was the proposal of a new law to limit public and press access to trials which posed a potential danger either to public decency or national security. Despite vigorous government efforts, this new legislation repeatedly stalled in the German Reichstag, in part because of concerns about protecting legal transparency and freedom of the press. The debates surrounding this law demonstrate the extent (and limits) to which liberal ideals such as legal transparency and freedom of the press had become embedded in Imperial German society and also the substantial power of the German Reichstag to obstruct the will of the government–even in making new laws deemed vital for national security.

Sixteen-year-old Acre resident Mustafa Naif, suspected of having sex with another man, stated before the police investigator on June 30, 1943, “I know Mustafa Zaharan and is my friend and mate, I used to love him and he used to love me, and that this man had a sexual intercourse with me twice with my consent and free will, because he loves me and I love him.”1 By the time of his trial, approximately a month later, Mustafa Naif must have realized this was the “wrong” story to tell. He recanted his statement and denied knowing Mustafa Zaharan or having anything to do with him. His denial might have been another manifestation of love, as an admission of guilt would have led to his friend's conviction on a sex offense. For his lover's sake, then, Mustafa Naif might have renounced his original romantic version. Indeed, his friend was acquitted as a result of the contradictory statements; however, Mustafa Naif was charged with perjury and was convicted after pleading guilty.

From the early 1900s to 1914, an informal, but dedicated, group of English-Canadian actors took up the cause of urban planning, forming connections with the international planning cohort, and circulating foreign innovations and expertise across the country. This article considers such urban planning networking, first exploring the local urban context from which interest in planning emerged, then, through the use of case-studies, studying the four key channels through which English-Canadian actors acquired and disseminated foreign planning information. Through this analysis, the conscious and critical nature of local interactions with the wider urban planning cohort is emphasized.

Perfectionism, the view that well-being is a matter of developing characteristically human capacities, has relatively few defenders in the literature, but plenty of critics. This article defends perfectionism against some recent formulations of classic objections, namely, the objection that perfectionism ignores the relevance of pleasure or preference for well-being, and a sophisticated version of the ‘wrong properties’ objection, according to which the intuitive plausibility of the perfectionist ideal is threatened by an absence of theoretical pressure to accept putative wrong properties cases. The article argues that these objections are unsuccessful, but introduce a new worry, the deep problem: perfectionism fails to offer a satisfying foundational justification for why developing the human essence is valuable. The article responds to the deep problem, ultimately arguing that it is a puzzle put to all theories of well-being to provide a justification for their normative significance.

Some – particularly Australasian – authors who have published in Polar Record may be familiar with the debate around the acceptability of the word ‘expeditioner’. The term is regularly used by Australians and New Zealanders, in both casual and official contexts. In The Antarctic Dictionary, Bernadette Hince (herself Australian) classifies the word as particularly (although not solely) Australian, notes its regular use by the Australian national programme, which publishes an Expeditioner Handbook, and defines it as ‘A member of an [A]ntarctic expedition, including a government expedition’ (Hince 2000: 118–119). However, ‘expeditioner’ appears in the Oxford English Dictionary only as a rare and obsolete term. The sole example cited in the OED Online is from 1758, in a non-polar context; the definition provided is ‘One engaged in an expedition’. Neither The Australian Oxford Dictionary (2nd edition, 2004) nor The New Zealand Oxford Dictionary (2005) includes ‘expeditioner’, although the term is included in the Australian Macquarie Dictionary (5th edition, 2009) and the US-based Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1993). There is clearly significant national variation in the term's acceptability and its use in an academic publication can draw negative attention (Stone 2003: 172 – not coincidentally, a British review of a book by an Australian author). This note argues that ‘expeditioner’ should not be dismissed as an idiolectic ungrammatical term unsuitable for use in British publications. We make a case for the use of ‘expeditioner’ on three grounds: conceptual appropriateness, precedence and convenience of expression.

The concept of liability is currently at the centre of contemporary debates on interpersonal defensive killing and war. This often leads to radically asymmetrical moral positions between aggressors and victims, and between just and unjust combatants. This article argues that the dichotomy liable/non-liable is too rigid to adequately capture the moral landscape in many relevant defensive killing situations. By contrast, it proposes a more granulated framework that takes seriously both the conceptual features of rights as essentially individualistic entities and their strength in moral reasoning. Finally, the article also shows that far from creating problems for the morality of killing in war, the proposed framework allows us to better accommodate for the position of unjust combatants than standard revisionist accounts of just war theory.