This chapter summarises the overarching narrative of this book and argues that as was as being intrinsically valuable it can inform contemporary debates about using law to regulate the practices of inducing intimacy. The discussion is organised around three sets of issues: the public and private dimensions of sex and intimate relationships, including the interests protected by law, the form of response (i.e., state or non-state), and the variety of legal response (i.e., public or private); the structure of legal responses, the meaning of consent and its relation to deception, targeted modes of deception, culpability matters, the requirement for a causal link between deception and ‘outcome’, and the temporalities of the legal wrong; and the substance of deceptions, including the dynamics governing the range of topics about which transparency has been expected. Drawing the discussion together, the chapter concludes by offering a new framework for constructing legal responses to deceptively induced intimacy, which builds on the core insight and these responses have historically been predicated on temporally sensitive associations between self-construction and intimacy.

There is no getting around the fact that we live in a social and cultural environment and there is no denying the fact that the laws of our society deeply affect its character. From the fact that law impacts the environment of those who are subject to it, it does not follow that legal officials should attempt to improve its ethical character. This chapter presents a presumptive case for why legal officials are not only permitted but also have a duty to do so. Ethical environmentalism is the political project that aims to satisfy that duty. After clarifying the notion of an ethical environment, and relating it to the aspirational ideal of the common good of a society, the chapter argues that ethical environmentalism is supported by considerations of fairness. The relation between fair treatment and neutral treatment is then explored and clarified. Ethical environmentalism presupposes a public/private distinction. The shared public world, as contrasted with the private thoughts and activities of individuals, defines its scope. With that in mind, the chapter distinguishes two forms of legal moralism, character-centered and status-centered, and discusses how each form relates to the project of ethical environmentalism.

This chapter analyses the policies and practices related to resolving investor–state disputes through ISDS. In this area, three broad themes emerged from our data. First, there are practices of forming the defence strategy for specific investment arbitrations and handling ISDS proceedings. The main issue is whether to engage lawyers from private practice and, if so, to what extent. Second, we discuss the matter of coordination and communication between various governance actors during ISDS proceedings. The third issue is that of dispute prevention. Given the stakes, risks, and challenges resulting from ISDS disputes, many governance actors dealing with IIAs realise that dispute prevention is crucial in internalising the IIA disciplines. This section focuses on various training and educative programmes for bureaucrats that were designed, proposed, or implemented to increase the knowledge about and awareness of IIAs within the broad sphere of national governance. We end with a discussion on the blurring of the public–private divide through the engagement of private expertise in the service of the public when defending ISDS cases.

With the expansion of the postal system from the mid seventeenth century, there was a growing interest in epistolary writing. Like real letter writers, authors of early epistolary novels focus on the material conditions of communication by letter. The most common plot devices have to do with what can go wrong in the postal system. Letter novels typically present themselves as a collection of real letters, a packet that has been lost and found, or entrusted to a friend who arranged for their publication. Epistolary fiction appealed to readers newly fascinated with how intimate thoughts could be expressed in writing, and what pleasure, as well as utility, could be drawn from reading the private thoughts of others. The letter novel was also congenial to some of the core aspirations of Enlightenment thought: a commitment to dialogical thinking, an openness to cultural difference, the notion of a ‘Republic of letters’ formed by conversational exchange between educated people who were often geographically separated. While epistolary fiction declined in popularity in the nineteenth century, letter novels have continued to resurface as experiments in narrative form, well suited to exploring contrasting subjectivities and the endless opportunities for failed and interrupted communication in the modern world.

The right to professional employment, and the training and education that this necessitated, had been central demands of British feminism since the 1860s. Financial independence and the fulfilment of creative potential were counterposed to the enforced idleness and dependencies of the middle-class home. The association of emancipation with the public world of work retained a powerful hold over the feminist imagination into the twentieth century, and the suffrage movement often pointed to women’s labour as the basis for their claim to citizenship. This rhetoric of work was seen to unite the interests of middle-class professional women and their working-class sisters. There was much uncertainty, however, over whether domestic labour ought to be included in this vision of ennobling and liberating work. The desire to free women from the burden of housework was not simply about protecting them from overwork, or allowing them to do other work, but often was articulated as the right to do better work. This chapter examines two debates in the suffrage movement that posed this question particularly sharply: first, those surrounding the proposal for the endowment of motherhood; second, the controversy over the course in Home Science and Economics at Kings College for Women.