This chapter advocates an ethic of “symmetric interpretation” as a solution to the challenges outlined in Chapter 1. To prevent undue politicization of constitutional law, judges should favor, when possible, constitutional understandings that are “symmetric” in the sense of conferring valuable protections across both sides of the nation’s major political and ideological divides. By the same token, they should disfavor understandings that frame constitutional law as a matter of zero-sum competition between rival partisan visions. Favoring symmetric understandings in this sense will not always be possible. When it is possible, however, favoring symmetry may provide a point of common orientation for judges with differing policy preferences and interpretive outlooks. Reflecting this approach's inherent appeal, an inchoate preference for symmetry is already evident in judges’ opinions, oral argument questions, and reasoning.

Often regarded as the oldest surviving work on strategy, the Sun Tzu text has influence in many quarters today. This study organizes Sun Tzu’s ideas under fourteen thematic headings. It also clarifies Sun Tzu’s limitations and blind spots. Building on Brigadier General Samuel B. Griffith, USMC (Ret.)’s translation, this study analyzes Sun Tzu from three standpoints: Sun Tzu (1), Sun Tzu’s ideas in their original Warring States Chinese context; Sun Tzu (2), Sun Tzu’s ideas applied to warfare in a military sense in other times and places; Sun Tzu (3), generalizations of those ideas, including to cyber warfare and other twenty-first-century strategic competitions. Whereas Sun Tzu (1) analysis addresses ways in which the text is a product of its times, intertwined with traditional Chinese cultural milieux, Sun Tzu (2) and (3) analyses, often building on analogical thinking, map universalistic aspects of Sun Tzu’s insights into war and conflict, strategy, logistics, information, intelligence, and espionage. Those analyses also identify ways in which Sun Tzu’s thinking has relevance to gaining strategic advantage in twenty-first-century conflicts.

Often regarded as the oldest surviving work on strategy, the Sun Tzu text has influence in many quarters today. This study organizes Sun Tzu’s ideas under fourteen thematic headings. It also clarifies Sun Tzu’s limitations and blind spots. Building on Brigadier General Samuel B. Griffith, USMC (Ret.)’s translation, this study analyzes Sun Tzu from three standpoints: Sun Tzu (1), Sun Tzu’s ideas in their original Warring States Chinese context; Sun Tzu (2), Sun Tzu’s ideas applied to warfare in a military sense in other times and places; Sun Tzu (3), generalizations of those ideas, including to cyber warfare and other twenty-first-century strategic competitions. Whereas Sun Tzu (1) analysis addresses ways in which the text is a product of its times, intertwined with traditional Chinese cultural milieux, Sun Tzu (2) and (3) analyses, often building on analogical thinking, map universalistic aspects of Sun Tzu’s insights into war and conflict, strategy, logistics, information, intelligence, and espionage. Those analyses also identify ways in which Sun Tzu’s thinking has relevance to gaining strategic advantage in twenty-first-century conflicts.

Despite the Western Front’s reputation for stagnation, the armies there strove for tactical, technological and organisational advantage. Learning was the fourth command task, and the chapter describes both how and what the German army learned about combined arms battle, the key to tactical success. By mid-1916, it had fallen behind the enemy. Evolution of doctrine to remedy this, resistance to it and measures to overcome the resistance. Case study on converting the doctrine into reality by training of command teams and formations.

Analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of German combined arms performance in the spring fighting. Different lessons learned and OHL’s more directive approach when updating doctrine to prevent chaos. Positive reputation of the doctrine but important tactical defects persisted. Strong evidence from this period both for and against the German army as a learning organisation: this ambivalence an important cause of uneven success converting learning into improved performance.

The epilogue concludes the book by summarizing the book’s key findings. In particular, it draws out five categories of implications following the book’s examination of coherence. These implications relate to fundamental aspects of international legal practice, including, crucially, to conceptual understandings of law, doctrine, epistemology, professional ethics in investor-state dispute settlement, and future institutional design in investor-state dispute settlement.

In this chapter I argue that we should take seriously the numerous vivid images of material begetting in Gregory of Nyssa’s Against Eunomius because they provide him with a more experientially based, and so intuitive, way to conceive of the hard-to-grasp idea that the first and second Person of the Trinity were both distinct entities and also unified in essence or nature. However, I shall also argue that Gregory was at the same time continuously correcting problems that an intuitive model of begetting might bring to the divine by returning to more theologically correct, reflective ways of conceiving of the divine. I shall argue that via this oscillation between intuitive ways of thinking about the divine and reflective and theological ways of thinking about it, which Ilkka Pyysiӓinen has argued is normal for theological discourse, Gregory was able to present the Trinity as what Dan Sperber has defined as a ‘relevant mystery’.

Constitutional law’s twofold logic of inquiry into authorization and prohibition provides the basic structure for constitutional law reasoning. It also supplies the method by which constitutional lawyers break down into discrete, manageable questions the complex set of facts and legal claims that a difficult constitutional problem presents. Finally, as Chapter 2 discussed, this logic rests on several presuppositions that further shape the analysis of any constitutional problem. We can now begin to consider how to solve a problem once we have identified the questions of constitutional law it raises. The answer to a constitutional question that is at all perplexing, or controversial among competent lawyers, can seldom if ever be identified by simply pointing to the constitutional text. Questions that can be answered in that fashion (do Wyoming and California really elect the same number of senators?) do not give rise to serious constitutional law debate, however puzzling they may be from other perspectives.

The growing judicialization of ISDS through the use of precedent may be contributing to improved consistency in the interpretation of the FET standard. The FET standard and its interpretation by arbitral tribunals has been blamed for giving foreign investors carte blanche to sanction governments over broad swathes of policy. It is said to be lacking any common definition and that it is a vague and ambiguous catch-all term. This chapter provides a rigorous qualitative and quantitative empirical assessment of the use of citations and their role in the development of the FET standard consistently by tribunals across time. Based on the in-depth exploration of FET case law the authors find that three landmark cases have a de facto stare decisis with the effect of reconciling competing interpretations and ultimately providing a relatively consistent standard.

This chapter introduces the issue addressed in this study, that is the allocation of international responsibility in a multi-layered structures like the European Union. It discusses the key doctrine on the question of responsibility of international organisations and points to the different approaches that dominate the discourse. This chapter also addresses the scope of the study, noting that it is focused on the questions of international responsibility that arise in international economic law. The introductory chapter also notes the methods of research employed in this study.

This chapter considers the fourth and final form of backlash discussed in the book: doctrinal challenges. Using examples from the European Court of Human Rights, this chapter considers how and why doctrinal challenges, or challenges that dilute the ability of human rights and criminal courts to affect domestic policy change, constitute a form of backlash. The chapter begins with a case study of Russia and the European Court of Human Rights and goes on to provides examples from the United Kingdom and Denmark. As this chapter shows, backlash politics can come from both traditional foes as well as long-standing supporters.

Although Egypt in the fifth century was highly integrated into the empire, it also began to develop new elements of distinctiveness. In part this trend resulted from divisions in theology and church politics that emerged around the Council of Chalcedon in 451, leading to deep splits in the church by the middle of the sixth century and the creation of competing church hierarchies. The native Egyptian language came to have its own literature and began to be used more widely in official contexts. At the same time, Alexandria remained a vibrant center of Greek culture, which permeated the rest of Egypt as well. The economic and social elite of the cities, increasingly closely tied to the imperial administration, concentrated wealth and power in their hands to a degree not seen earlier, even as most of the population continued to live in villages and work the land.

Chapter V applies concepts from preceding chapters to investigate the future character of war and war’s future as a human activity. The chapter begins by exploring the challenge of future forecasting and strategy development, which is compounded by the accumulation of human and environmental effects that invalidate assumptions. The chapter asserts that forecasting may be improved by considering three sets of factors: history and trends, current circumstances, and theory. Next, it explores political, technological, and doctrinal developments that could impact war’s future character, like artificial intelligence and nanotechnology, and provides strategic advice for both high and low capacity groups. The chapter’s latter half uses the history-current circumstances-theory model to assess the feasibility and desirability of ending war forever. Using evidence from archaeology, anthropology, history, trends, and war and peace theories, the chapter concludes that war’s existence is inextricably linked to humanity, i.e., eliminating either eliminates both. It wraps up by offering practical suggestions for minimizing the potential for war.