The Mental Capacity Act 2005 in England and Wales (MCA) is explicit in prescribing a values-based legal framework, centred around the concepts of ‘mental capacity’ and ‘best interests’. In legal proceedings, the specialist Court of Protection must grapple with fundamental questions relating to the interpretation and application of the MCA’s principled requirements, with each case having its own distinctive factual matrix and a unique person at the heart of the whole process.

This paper develops a novel argument to show that prospective research subjects can validly consent to participate in a study without understanding (most of) the content of the required disclosure. Its point of departure is the right subjects standardly have to waive (most of) the investigator’s duty to disclose. Things get worse for autonomy based defences of informed consent because this right to waive is very well grounded in an individual’s autonomy.

he historiography of postwar Japan often tells the stories of those with the status and power to make themselves remembered – usually those who were members of elite families or institutions, with social, political or financial power. They were, moreover, often male. Yet we have ignored many other submerged voices which tell a qualitatively different story. Historians have never seen these figures as providing an intellectual or coherent response to the conditions of postwar Japan, perhaps because they did not belong to institutions or recognized organizations and movements.

The burgeoning social scientific debate about urban commons rarely focuses on the visual aspects of public space, the most elementary shared good in cities. In the former Japanese capital of Kyoto, however, the townscape has been intensely debated over the last decades. Reacting to widespread discontent with the previous laissez-faire policy, the city now boasts one of the strictest building codes of the nation.