State responses to the recent ‘crisis’ caused by misinformation in social media have mainly aimed to impose liability on those who facilitate its dissemination. Internet companies, especially large platforms, have deployed numerous techniques, measures and instruments to address the phenomenon. However, little has been done to assess the importance of who originates disinformation and, in particular, whether some originators of misinformation are acting contrary to their preexisting obligations to the public. My view is that it would be wrong to attribute only to social media a central or exclusive role in the new disinformation crisis that impacts the information ecosystem. I also believe that disinformation has different effects depending on who promotes it – particularly whether it is promoted by a person with a public role. Importantly, the law of many countries already reflects this distinction – across a variety of contexts, public officials are obligated both to affirmatively provide certain types of information, and to take steps to ensure that information is true. In contrast, private individuals rarely bear analogous obligations; instead, law often protects their misstatements, in order to prevent censorship and promote public discourse.

Chapter 4 is dedicated to the concept of informality as a crucial legal concept for the understanding of trilogues. It begins from a twofold observation. First, the informal nature of trilogues is stated in black and white in a significant variety of legal instruments. Secondly, the role of legal scholarship is to make sense of that unequivocal characterization. Drawing on institutional theory, this chapter argues that informality is a full-blown concept of EU law, and it sets about defining its characteristics. To that end, it compares trilogues with two other informal bodies, namely the Euro Group and the Informal Council meetings. The core idea of this chapter is that the codification of informality translates into legal terms the intention of the institutions to protect certain spaces from an excessive penetration of legal normativity. This intention, in turn, is indicative of the desire to preserve those spaces for the emergence of powerful social frameworks where genuine exchanges among actors may occur; exchanges that should be conducive to compromise.

What does it mean “to tolerate” in a post-Christian and post-secular state? This chapter argues that antecedents of contemporary conflicts over diversity in Europe can be found in early modernity, specifically in early modern practices of toleration, which impacted on both the belonging and the visibility of minorities. New forms of intolerance pertain to the position of religious, ethnoreligious, and sexual minorities in public life, echoing the concerns of the public visibility of minorities inhering in historical Christendom. The political articulation of certain groups as “other” to “the nation” is increasingly mediated through constitutional repertoires, such as constitutional revision and amendments, developments in the hermeneutics of constitutional concepts, or pseudo-constitutional behaviour. This chapter introduces the main themes: tolerance and intolerance, constitutionalism, secularisation, and their significance across the liberal–illiberal divide.

The last major chapter of the book reflects on the question of ‘happiness’ as discussed by Popper, Hayek, and Neurath, but also presents a case study of how Neurath not only theorized on such matters but also sought to make a practical difference by collaboration in planning projects. He became a consultant for the redevelopment of Bilston, a small town blighted by the legacy of the Industrial Revolution. In discussion with town councillors and architects, he steered plans by taking into account the needs of residents, seeking to represent those whose voice was generally not heard. This finally led to Neurath being interviewed in the mainstream media, marking acceptance and respect for Neurath in British culture. He did not want to use his broad learning to set himself apart as an intellectual but instead to articulate the needs of ordinary people.

The KBD theorem is about embedding subsequences of shifts of a suitably regular set into some target set. Developing work of Kingman (1963, 1964), we extend this here to embedding into all members of a family of sets. Useful here is the idea of shift-compactness. We also begin to pass effortlessly between the category and measure cases by working bitopologically, using the Euclidean topology for the category case and the density topology (Chapter 7) for the measure case.

This chapter first considers the evolution of the concept of the ‘cultural landscape’, expanding from its traditional connection with physical geography and heritage to a broader humanities-based discourse. It examines the interactions among landscapes, societies, and their collective memories, illustrating how these connections transcend geographical boundaries and historical epochs. The chapter underscores the shift towards a landscape culturalism that acknowledges the symbiosis between digital and physical landscapes, which influences cultural and individual identities. In presenting the cultural landscape as a dynamic space where organisations, societies, and consumers’ perceptions vary based on temporal and cultural contexts, it proposes a framework for understanding how brands interact within this landscape, influencing consumer behaviour and the construction of cultural identity both in physical and digital spaces, including digital cities and suburbs.

The New Testament authors take up wine metaphors and signs from the Hebrew Bible and other writings to mark the kingdom of God present in Jesus Christ. Wine is critical to the Eucharist instituted in the Last Supper and at the cross, and offers a vision of abundance through the apocalypse of Revelation in the final judgment and in the new kingdom.

The ILO seized on the reference to ‘forced labour’ in the definition of human trafficking in the UN protocol to carve out a prominent role as a key knowledge producer in the global antislavery governance network. This chapter describes how the ILO’s Forced Labour Convention treats consent as the mark of free labour. Despite this narrow understanding, it argues that, by diagnosing forced labour as a problem resulting from the failure of labour market regulation, the ILO’s prescription extends well beyond unfree labour. It also explains how the traditional territorial format of the ILO’s governance authority, which is rooted in a national sovereignty, makes it difficult to regulate forced labour associated with international migration and global supply chains. The ILO’s biggest challenge: to persuade the employers’ organisation, which along with states and trade unions are the ILO’s constituents, to agree to a convention to govern global supply chains.

The chapter describes the development history and controlling dynamics of strike-slip faulting in various geologic settings, and its transition to continental breakup and the early drifting stage.