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.

The counterfactual question of whether Christ would have come had there been no fall turns out not to be the most helpful way of investigating the matter. The real question is whether God’s means are consistent with God’s ends – whether the story of God’s purpose to be with us now and always is a more encompassing narrative than the smaller story of evil, sin, suffering and death, and whether there is utter consistency between the Jesus who is with us in the incarnation and the Jesus who is with us always. In this chapter I investigate Karl Barth’s proposal and, while appreciating its very significant contributions to my project, find it finally wanting on these grounds. Barth helpfully renarrates election as the election of Jesus Christ, but his account of salvation is inconsistent with his Christocentrism and his eschatology is thin.

This chapter explores symmetry’s implications for the law of democracy. Symmetry has obvious relevance in this area, given the centrality of election-related disputes to maintaining courts’ political neutrality. At a minimum, symmetric interpretation should encourage the Supreme Court to ensure greater consistency in its emergency orders blocking legal changes before an election. In addition, symmetry may help justify the Court’s controversial decisions leaving both partisan gerrymanders and choices about overall districting procedures to the political process. In combination, if not in isolation, these rulings are symmetric because they avoid constitutionalizing one position or the other on politically charged questions about appropriate criteria for districting. Finally, symmetry should support closer scrutiny of voting rules and procedures with skewed partisan effects, provided that challengers can convincingly establish a meaningful impairment of political competition.

Rescission is a form of relief which is available in respect of a variety of transactions (contract, gifts and conveyances) where one of the parties is subject to a vitiating factor (such as duress, fraud or misrepresentation) and she wants to get out of or ‘set aside’ the transaction. Rescission allows her to reverse the transaction. It has been said that ‘[t]he basic objective of the relief given upon rescission is to restore the parties to their original positions or, where rescission occurs in equity, as near to those positions as may be’. There is no requirement for the party seeking to rescind to suffer loss in the sense in which this is understood in the context of compensatory damages: she merely has to point to a vitiating factor. Although the party seeking to rescind can set aside the transaction, it is not voided: rather, it is rendered ‘voidable’. In other words, a voidable contract is valid and effective unless and until the plaintiff elects to rescind it. However, once a contract is rescinded it ‘is treated in law as never having come into existence’, although it is recognised that it formerly existed. All unperformed obligations under the contract are extinguished once a contract has been rescinded. The contract is extinguished as from the beginning (ab initio).

In this chapter, we define a communication strategy for the 2022 Brazilian presidential election using public opinion inputs. We ask a simple question – what is the winning message?

To do this, we deploy polling results from three 2,000 interview face-to-face polls and a battery of focus groups. These are what we call a benchmark, designed to identify key message themes and other public opinion inputs. To assess the campaign in course, we will analyze about 40,900 interviews conducted during 152 days of tracking. Note that we did not work for any campaign in Brazil. But we polled for private sector clients who wanted to understand and predict the election. In that capacity, we used our polling to mimic campaign dynamics in order to assess their relative effectiveness.

Predictions often falter because of human error. Most misses have much more to do with our own human shortcomings than with the technical sophistication of the method at hand. In our experience, forecasting errors occur when we discard or misinterpret evidence right in front of us. The clues are there, but we are blinded by our own filters. This is why it is essential to tackle such biases and discuss corresponding solutions. In this chapter, we’ll look at studies on the forecasting prowess of experts. Then, we’ll focus on cognitive biases that skew predictions. Finally, we’ll present an applied approach to minimize such biases.

This chapter explicates the language of mystery, which was one of the Laudians’ preferred modes for treating the topic of predestination. The workings of the divine will were held to be so far above the puny categories of human reason that the process of subjecting the former to the demands of the latter was taken to be in itself a form of the presumption, perhaps even the sacrilege, of which the Laudians so frequently accused the puritans. The fine print of predestination was thus far better left wreathed in the language of mystery, a language that wise divines also used to deal with topics like the Trinity or Christology. There were, the Laudians maintained, central features of the Christian faith which were best simply believed rather than reduced to a list of numbered doctrinal propositions, to be then defended through entirely human procedures of syllogistic reasoning. In some circumstances, and certain moods, the Laudians held predestination to be one of those areas of difficulty, presented by God for human belief, rather than for theological enquiry.

This chapter explores the Laudian critique of the (allegedly) puritan doctrine of absolute predestination, and particularly absolute reprobation. This critique imputed an absolute, fatal or stoic necessity to questions of salvation and damnation, which, the Laudians claimed, reduced the role of human free will and moral effort to nothing. In so doing it created desperately difficult pastoral dilemmas for ministers trying to rescue members of their flocks from the desperation such doctrines all too often induced. This was particularly the case for absolute reprobation. It was in the course of dealing with puritan error on this subject that the Laudians came to deal with the topic of predestination, and faute de mieux, to adumbrate their own position, asserting that saving grace was offered to all, that Christ died for the sins of the whole world, that God willed the salvation of every sinner, that human effort was required for salvation, that true faith could be totally and finally lost and that no one was simply doomed to damnation; contentions which they defended not as resolutions of the paradoxes at the heart of the debate about predestination, but rather as saving truths central to the nature of Christianity.

One of the most common tenets of royal and messianic ideologies is the notion that the king ruled by divine favor. This ideology was variously signaled, very often by way of omens, dream visions, as well as other predictive mechanisms, epithets, and even the direct intervention of the gods. Chapter 1 explores the way that this ideology takes shape in non-Jewish kingship treatises as well as various early Jewish texts, focusing especially on messianic figures which serve as archetypes for Revelation’s Christ, including King David and the Danielic and Enochic Son of Man.

We then explore Revelation’s appropriation of this ideology, including especially the preponderance of messianic titles as well as the investiture scene in Revelation 5, where the Lamb’s reception of the scroll from the right hand of God signals divine favor and his right to rule on God’s behalf. These strategies for designating Jesus as God’s chosen vicegerent are viewed in light of similar tropes in other early Christian texts.

One of the most common tenets of royal and messianic ideologies is the notion that the king ruled by divine favor. This ideology was variously signaled, very often by way of omens, dream visions, as well as other predictive mechanisms, epithets, and even the direct intervention of the gods. Chapter 1 explores the way that this ideology takes shape in non-Jewish kingship treatises as well as various early Jewish texts, focusing especially on messianic figures which serve as archetypes for Revelation’s Christ, including King David and the Danielic and Enochic Son of Man.

We then explore Revelation’s appropriation of this ideology, including especially the preponderance of messianic titles as well as the investiture scene in Revelation 5, where the Lamb’s reception of the scroll from the right hand of God signals divine favor and his right to rule on God’s behalf. These strategies for designating Jesus as God’s chosen vicegerent are viewed in light of similar tropes in other early Christian texts.

Chapter 5, in parallel to the preceding one, focuses on the other, elected chamber of the Estates Assembly (or Parliament) and discusses Hegel’s characteristic notion of a representation of interests, along with the broader societal conditions for successful representation. The chapter first reconstructs and contextualises the electoral mechanism as envisioned by Hegel and elucidates the political significance of corporation membership, which connects Hegel’s civil society and state. In this context, special attention is paid to the exclusion of women, while Hegel’s purported negligence of farmers is refuted. The chapter then sets out the conditions Hegel considered necessary for the successful representation of societal interests, which include freedom of the press and trials by jury, notwithstanding his ambivalent attitude towards public opinion. The final section shows that these very preconditions were under siege at the time Hegel was writing, following the politically motivated murder of Kotzebue and the institution of the so-called Karlsbad decrees. The direct bearing of these circumstances on the publication of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right rounds off this contextual study.