The common law tradition has always been sceptical of philosophy, prioritising the importance of practical experience in real world cases over abstract general ideas. This article attempts to demonstrate how the ideas of two philosophers—Fuller and Wittgenstein—help to explain the widespread use of the notion of purpose in real world case law. Fuller’s conception of law as the enterprise of subjecting human conduct to the governance of rules illuminates the common law’s respect for the agency of legal subjects, whether that be respecting parties’ purposes in making a contractual bargain or using purpose as a basis for limiting liability in tort. Similarly, Wittgenstein’s conception of language demonstrates the necessity of resort to purpose in interpretation, as the open-textured nature of words means that legal rules only become determinate when used in specific contexts for specific purposes. The article focuses primarily on the United Kingdom’s (UK) legal system, with its two tracks of the common law and parliamentary legislation, but also extends the argument to examples drawn from forms of supranational law to demonstrate that the analysis is capable of being generalised beyond the UK’s legal system.

In the pharmaceutical sector an increasing number of new medicines are large-molecule products, namely biologics derived from living organisms, rather than small-molecule drugs synthesised from chemicals. Unlike small-molecule medicines, which are relatively easy to manufacture, large-molecule products are less stable and harder to produce. We investigate whether the current UK legal system provides an appropriate balance between the protection provided to technology owners and the public interest in accessing medical technologies, especially in times of emergencies. At present, UK law facilitates compulsory licensing of patents but has no equivalent scheme for trade secrets. Our analysis of the legal constraints on potential reforms suggests that a mechanism for compulsory licensing of trade secrets would be compatible with UK domestic law, the European Convention on Human Rights, the World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights and other international agreements, provided appropriate safeguards are put in place to balance the rights of intellectual property holders with the public interest. The article contributes a detailed framework for the compulsory licensing of trade secrets, drawing parallels with voluntary technology transfer agreements, including provisions for defining the scope of transfer, maintaining confidentiality, restricting future use, providing fair compensation and ensuring enforceability.

L’usage du français au Québec est en recul (Commissaire à la langue française, 2024a; Statistique Canada, 2022), contribuant à la perception que la langue française est menacée. Cette situation soulève plusieurs questions quant à l’évolution temporelle de l’opinion publique relativement à cette perception et ses conséquences politiques. Dans cet article, nous examinons d’abord l’évolution de l’opinion publique concernant la perception selon laquelle la langue française serait menacée afin de quantifier les changements survenus entre 1993 et 2024. Ensuite, nous analysons les déterminants de ce sentiment de menace. Enfin, nous examinons les conséquences électorales en politique fédérale. Les résultats illustrent (1) qu’une forte majorité des citoyens estime que le français est menacé, (2) cette proportion a nettement augmenté à travers le temps et (3) ce sentiment est lié au choix électoral. Ces conclusions suggèrent que les enjeux linguistiques constituent un facteur crucial pour mieux saisir la politique québécoise et canadienne.

In this paper, we study the existence of $k$-$11$-representations of graphs. Inspired by work on permutation patterns, these representations are ways of representing graphs by words where adjacencies between vertices are captured by patterns in the corresponding letters. Our main result is that all graphs are $1$-$11$-representable, answering a question originally raised by Cheon et al. in 2018 and repeated in several follow-up papers – including a very recent paper, where it was shown that all graphs on at most $8$ vertices are $1$-$11$-representable. Moreover, we prove that all graphs are permutationally $1$-$11$-representable – that is representable as the concatenation of permutations of the vertices – answering the existence question in extremely strong fashion. Our construction leads to nearly optimal bounds on the length of the words, as well. It can, moreover, be adapted to represent all acyclic orientations of graphs; this generalizes the fact that word-representations capture semi-transitive orientations of graphs. Our construction also adapts easily to other $k \geq 2$ as well, giving representations using a linear number of permutations when the best known previous bounds used a quadratic number. Finally, we also consider the (non-)existence of ‘even–odd’-representations of graphs. This answers a question raised by Wanless after a conference talk in 2018.

Perceptual disturbances are common in psychiatric and neurological conditions, yet some rare, non-psychotic disorders remain poorly recognised. This review examines two such syndromes: visual snow syndrome (VSS) and exploding head syndrome (EHS). VSS is marked by continuous ‘static’ across the visual field, often accompanied by palinopsia, photophobia and entoptic phenomena. EHS involves sudden, loud auditory sensations – like explosions or crashes – occurring during transitions between sleep and wakefulness. Although distinct in modality, both share common challenges: subjective distressing symptoms, normal investigation findings, frequent misdiagnosis and psychiatric comorbidities such as anxiety, sleep dysfunction and depersonalisation. The article synthesises emerging evidence on their neurobiological underpinnings, including cortical hyperexcitability, thalamocortical dysrhythmia and impaired sensory gating, and on pharmacological and non-pharmacological treatment options. Enhancing clinical awareness and adopting a multidisciplinary approach are essential for improving diagnosis and care. This article aims to support psychiatrists in recognising, differentiating and managing these complex perceptual disorders.

German federal elections have long drawn international attention due to the country’s economic influence and its pivotal role in the European Union. Over time, forecasting these elections has evolved into a sophisticated discipline, incorporating diverse models and refined methodologies to improve accuracy. Since 2013, PS: Political Science & Politics has played a key role in tracking these developments by publishing three special symposia dedicated to forecasting German elections (Jérôme 2013, 2017; Jérôme and Graefe 2022). This 2025 symposium marks the fourth installment, continuing a tradition of providing scholars with a platform to share insights and reflect on the field’s ongoing expansion.

This essay opens JAS’s special issue on American Studies and the 2024 Election in which contributors explore issues that rose to prominence during the election campaign and the first months of the second Trump administration using a variety of disciplinary lenses and methodologies. It analyses why Trump became only the second president in history to win non-consecutive terms in office and assesses the transformative significance of his early second-term initiatives. At the same time, it advances the guiding premise of the special issue: that the broad objects of study, interdisciplinary approaches, and asynchronous perspectives of American Studies can combine with history and political science to help us better understand Trump’s victory, its causes, and its possible consequences. As demonstrated by It Can’t Happen Here, literature and other cultural outputs can enrich understanding of American history and politics at any given time. As an Area Studies discipline, with a geographical organising principle that compliments the traditional chronological frameworks of English and History, American Studies foregrounds relations between states and regions, and at a national and transnational scale that shape US politics and require consideration to better appreciate the complexity of the country that national aggregates may fail to reveal.

In this paper, we develop a model economy to study how financial innovations affect financial access and inequality. Financial innovations alter distribution of costs. In this way, the measure of buyers is endogenous regarding the payment method. In studying financial innovations in an economy with limited commitment, it is possible to bridge two existing literatures. When comparing stationary equilibria, we find that the results depend on the scarcity of collateral. Moreover, the expected welfare and inequality are affected by consumers access to the form of payment systems.

The recovery model of mental health care is distinct from the biomedical model of mental health care. To promote one runs the risk of marginalising the other. Both approaches have merit. Values of hope and optimism, social inclusion, collaborative decision-making, retaining a personal identity beyond an identity simply defined by a diagnosis of mental illness, are all central to the recovery model. A reorientation of mental health services is required, a change in culture which embodies the principles of a recovery model within which, the perspectives of patients and families are heard together with the perspectives of mental health professionals who have knowledge and expertise to offer. In Meath Community Mental Health Services we have implemented such a recovery model, the model of open dialogue where principles of dialogue, social inclusion, immediate help and collaborative decision-making are paramount. We began this service in 2019 and carried out an audit of the first 6 months of our implementation. The audit illustrated overwhelming satisfaction from service users and their families with the new approach. On foot of our successful pilot project we have extended the model of open dialogue to other teams in Meath and Louth, including the in-patient unit in Drogheda. Our open dialogue project illustrates how a recovery model of mental health care can be successfully implemented in a public mental health system.

Designing efficient and rigorous numerical methods for sequential decision-making under uncertainty is a difficult problem that arises in many applications frameworks. In this paper we focus on the numerical solution of a subclass of impulse control problems for the piecewise deterministic Markov process (PDMP) when the jump times are hidden. We first state the problem as a partially observed Markov decision process (POMDP) on a continuous state space and with controlled transition kernels corresponding to some specific skeleton chains of the PDMP. We then proceed to build a numerically tractable approximation of the POMDP by tailor-made discretizations of the state spaces. The main difficulty in evaluating the discretization error comes from the possible random jumps of the PDMP between consecutive epochs of the POMDP and requires special care. Finally, we discuss the practical construction of discretization grids and illustrate our method on simulations.