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A television comic announces a satiric Golden Fleece Award for the faux pas of some government official. The San Diego Chicken hams it up in the stands of the baseball park. A Swiss mime troupe advertises the services of a communications corporation. All these may be more familiar to young people today than is a circus clown. These and other entertainers are all in the business of laughter and provide commentaries on current society.

The high crimes of bribery and money laundering resonate vividly with the public, especially where politically exposed persons (PEPs) are involved. Conventional wisdom thus far, dictates the adoption of even stiffer criminal sanctions for perpetrators of such crimes to solidify deterrence. This paper contends that while this approach may be a viable option in respect of PEPs in Western jurisdictions, it is less so with PEPs in Africa, where their peculiar socio-legal antecedents have rendered the venomous arrow of criminal sanction a largely anodyne prickle. The paper further contends that only a paradigm shift away from criminal to tougher civil remedy options can effectively address the endemic incidents of a growing number of PEPs actively engaged in financial crime aimed at asset stripping the state for personal gain in Africa.

The paper juxtaposes empirical evidence from historical records with comparative regional and international approaches to establish some creative new thinking on the subject matter.

The paper makes an important, significant and persuasive argument for a kind of paradigm shift in the approach to fighting corruption by PEPs in Africa specifically …. It is quite creative in deciphering a major root cause of the ineffectiveness in most of Africa of criminal sanction as an anti-corruption weapon, and in pressing trust law and the principles of fiduciary obligation into the service of thinking through the reinvigoration of the legal battle against corruption in Africa.

The paper makes a significant original contribution to the legal and policy literature. The author also displays an impressively sound technical command of the relevant and rather pivotal trust law principles and case law.

The schools of information studies of today place training for work in distributed computing environments at the core of the curriculum. However, this was not the case ten years ago. Looks, therefore, at the current role of traditionally trained librarians. Focusses on the experience of the University of Michigan Library’s Documents Center, and how the collection development principles learned for selection of traditional library media apply today to selecting Internet materials.

This article¹ is offered up in the spirit of what the High Kings of Gondor might call a weregild.² That is, I hope, in this article, to clear a debt: a debt, long overdue, much like that owed by the Armies of the Dead to Isildur’s heir, Aragorn son of Arathorn. I reference The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Tolkien, 1994) because this article is, in the main, about Tolkien and his oeuvre as an astonishing instance of what might be called lex populi. But this article attempts more than just another cultural legal reading of a popular literary and cinematic phenomenon.³ What, in fact, it proposes is nothing less than a practical demonstration of what it means to read jurisprudentially. In so doing, I hope to repay some of the theoretical debt that jurisprudence (and law-and-literature) has incurred, and owes so clearly to literary criticism, cultural studies and Continental philosophy. For far too long jurisprudence has been content to absorb the lessons of these other disciplines’ versions of textual theory – of the play of the sign, the dissemination of meaning, the deconstruction of logos – without propounding its own topoi let alone interpretive paradigms. Such topoi, of course, jurisprudence has in abundance: in notions of a “higher justice”; in concepts of law’s connection with morality; and, especially, the law’s role in inaugurating “the social.”

To report on findings from the evaluation of two innovative community‐based prevention projects in the UK targeted at children disaffected from school, one involving football the other horticulture.

Qualitative inquiry focusing on three areas: “theories of change” underpinning the projects; referral and operational processes; inter‐agency partnerships. Main methods were: an interactive event for 50 practitioners; semi‐structured interviews with project staff, project participants and other stakeholders; review of project documentation; observations.

Both the projects evaluated had clear and plausible “theories of change”. Referral processes were effective. Strong variations in “dosage” and length of project involvement appeared to be linked to differences in the effectiveness of the two projects.

The principal limitation to the research was the lack of case monitoring and outcome data that prevented any quantitative assessment of the projects. Further research is needed to establish the long‐term impact of this kind of targeted prevention work.

Prevention work targeted at children disaffected from school needs to be underpinned by clear “theories of change”. Effective work requires good relationships with referring schools, the delivery of multi‐faceted interventions and interventions to be of an adequate length.

The focus on “theories of change” or mechanisms is an original contribution to the prevention literature. The paper will be valuable for those working in drug action teams and local authorities in planning prevention work for young people. The two projects were highly innovative in involving pupils in two very different activities – football and horticulture.

Quality assurance (QA) in open and distance learning (ODL) has always become universal concerns of stakeholders. The quality of ODL has been confronted with challenges in terms of the diversity of inputs, processes, the complex supply chain management of ODL and recent paradigm shift into online learning. Assuring the quality of ODL are daunting tasks at individual, institution and system levels. Completed before the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, this study aims to better understand the implementation of QA system in three Asian open universities (OUs), namely University of the Philippines Open University (UPOU), Universitas Terbuka (UT), Indonesia and Allama Iqbal Open University (AIOU), Pakistan.

A qualitative method was employed involving analysis of documents of the three Asian OUs and focus group discussions and interviews with management and staff. Data collected were then analyzed to draw conclusions and possible recommendations.

Findings of this study presented good practices, challenges and rooms for improvement of the QA system in the three Asian OUs. Focusing on students and stakeholders in their QA effort, this study has revealed that quality begins with inner self and is multidimensional. QA is principally viewed as continuous improvement, as mechanism and assessment and as effort at exceeding expectations of students and stakeholders. The recent challenge for QA is to embrace a delicate process of ODL transformation into online digital system. The recent COVID-19 outbreak has further implications and challenged QA implementation in ODL in higher education into the next level of complexity.

This study revealed the diversities in how OUs met the societal needs of their respective stakeholders and addressed the challenges ahead for QA in ODL.

These findings were expected to enhance the understanding of the theory and practice of QA in ODL and to contribute to quality improvement of ODL programs.

The landscape of adult social care, and in particular of adult safeguarding, has shifted considerably over the last decade. Alongside policy changes in the responses to adult abuse, there have been shifts in professional and public understanding of what falls within the remit of this area of work. This results, arguably, in differing understandings of how adult safeguarding is constructed and understood. Given the increasing emphasis on multi-agency inter-professional collaboration, service user involvement and lay advocacy, it is important to consider and reflect on how both professionals and lay people understand this area of work. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This study employed Augusto Boal’s model of Forum Theatre to explore how a variety of professional and lay groups understood, related to and engaged with how the Care Act 2014 defines and describes “adult safeguarding”.

Lay participants responded to the scenario in a variety of ways, upholding the construct validity of “adult safeguarding” and the authority of the social worker. Social care and health practitioners sought orderly, professionalised and sometimes ritualistic solutions to the “adult safeguarding” scenario presented, seeking carefully to structure and to manage lay involvement. Inter-professional collaboration was often problematic. The role of lay advocates was regarded ambiguously and ambivalently.

This paper offers a number of practice and research recommendations. Safeguarding practitioners could benefit from more effective and reflexive inter-professional collaboration. Both practitioners and service users could benefit from the more thoughtful deployment of the lay advocates encouraged within the Care Act 2014 and associated guidance.