The recession of the 1970s saw the advent of financialised capitalism and a renewed focus on cost containment in health care. At the same time, new identity politics had displaced the old politics of distribution associated with the welfare state. The political contraction of the welfare state, together with the spread of ‘precarity’ in employment via zero-hours contracts, and the undermining of work conditions, sick pay and pensions have been facilitated by a recasting of personal responsibility. Strong flows of biological, psychological, social, cultural, spatial, symbolic and, especially, material asset flows are conducive to good health and longevity, while weak flows are associated with poor health and premature death. Ideological assaults on the welfare state have been major contributors to growing material and social inequalities. Financial capitalism has witnessed an accelerating rate of mental as well as physical health problems in line with the fracturing of society. The period 1960–2010 set the scene for what many at the time of writing (2020) see as a severe crisis in welfare care.

Although political misinformation is not a new phenomenon, the topic has received renewed attention in recent years, in conjunction with sweeping changes in the contemporary media environment. As the Internet and, particularly, social media become an increasingly common source for political information, citizens receive more and more of their news in an uncontrolled and minimally regulated setting where misinformation may easily spread. However, even if the sources of misinformation have fundamentally changed, best practices for correcting misinformation have not. While many of the pieces cited in this chapter do not focus explicitly on the Internet or social media, these works can still inform scholarly understanding of how to correct misinformation on these platforms. The cognitive processes we highlight are likely to translate to the digital realm and are thus crucial to understand when developing prescriptions for social media-based misinformation. Nevertheless, we also spotlight a number of recent studies that examine methods for correcting misinformation in the context of social media.

The author compares the practice of trade and investment adjudicators in relation to the requirement to interpret a treaty ‘in the light of its object and purpose’. He begins by identifying a range of issues and choices that adjudicators are confronted with in this regard, and the practical barriers to any significant degree of judicial interaction or cross-fertilization between trade and investment adjudicators with respect to those issues. He then shows that notwithstanding the absence of judicial interaction, there is a remarkable degree of convergence in the legal reasoning of trade and investment adjudicators on diverse issues. Among the issues, he includes the basis for identifying a treaty's object and purpose, the need to balance competing objectives, the recognition of some of the limitations of purposive reasoning, and even standard forms of consequentialist arguments. The final section argues that such convergence is most easily explained by the theory that many aspects of legal reasoning and treaty interpretation derive not from knowledge of prior precedent and judicial practices, but from common sense and the nature of the judicial function.