This chapter addresses symmetry’s implications for expressive freedom and religious liberty. Symmetry supports maintaining First Amendment law’s current focus on neutrality, notwithstanding emerging critiques that this approach lacks a strong historical foundation and unduly limits governmental regulation of offensive or dangerous ideas. At the same time, symmetric interpretation counsels against expanding the emerging “First Amendment Lochnerism” that threatens to extend constitutional protections for free expression into areas of economic and workplace regulation. A preference for symmetry also supports protecting religious groups, when possible, through more general protections for freedom of expressive association rather than through religion-specific constitutional doctrines. Although religious liberty may once have been a symmetric principle, today religion-specific protections risk placing constitutional law on one side of a fraught political divide over religion’s place in public life.

The regulation of services pursues both economic (market failure, protection and promotion of competition) and non-economic objectives. The regulation has to accommodate different ‘modes’ – the World Trade Organization identifies four ‘modes’ of trade in commercial services. The modes will be used as themes to explore the concepts used by the Court to create a single internal market in services. Cases arising from broadcasting rules and gambling will demonstrate the deference to national autonomy in issues of ‘cross-border supply’. However, cases concerning ‘consumption abroad’, in particular of healthcare services, demonstrate a less deferential approach. The strongest defence of free movement of services and establishment appears in cases dealing with ‘commercial presence’ and ‘presence of natural persons’. It will be seen that the CJ tries to defend the rights of natural and legal persons under these provisions. Before plunging into the case law, the primary and secondary rules will be laid out.

Protestants have played a role in shaping the political ideology of every major party in the United States and in formulating nearly every major public policy. Most American Protestants have believed that the US government should not create a religious establishment or endorse one religious denomination or sect to the exclusion of others; they have been suspicious of any religious organization’s attempt to control the minds or votes of its followers and impose its religious principles on others through public law; and they have also generally seen political activity as a moral enterprise, governed by broadly shared (Protestant-inspired) norms. These tenets of political behavior are so deeply engrained in the nation’s consciousness that their appeal has extended well beyond Protestant circles. But as uncontroversial as most of these tenets might seem to Americans today, their development was a contested part of the nation’s history.

The eighteenth-century American founders believed that religion is special and deserves special constitutional protection, and that all peaceable faiths must be drawn into the constitutional process and protection. The founders introduced six constitutional principles for the protection of religious freedom – freedom of conscience, free exercise of religion, religious pluralism, religious equality, separation of church and state, and no federal establishment of religion. Since the 1940s, the US Supreme Court has upheld these religious freedom principles in more 170 cases, albeit unevenly of late. Moreover, in recent years religious freedom has come under sharp popular and academic attack, particularly as religious pathologies have come to light and religious freedom claims have clashed with sexual liberty claims. This chapter calls for a return to the first principles of religious freedom for all, at home and abroad, and for a new balance between religious freedom and other fundamental rights claims.

The debate over the presence and nature of a single established church in England is perhaps the most important religious issue in the long eighteenth century. From the Elizabethan ‘Penal Laws’ designed to suppress Roman Catholicism to the ‘Clarendon Code’, intended to limit the civil participation of Protestant Nonconformists, the history of religious establishment in England reveals patterns of protectionism and exclusion necessary to maintain the privileged position of the Church ‘as by law established’. New ideas in the eighteenth century, such as toleration and deism, as well as the rise of Methodism, challenged but did not overcome this Anglican hegemony.

To determine the “will of the legislator,” William Blackstone pointed to “signs” of those intentions, the first of which is the words understood in their usual sense. This chapter will show the degree to which the words, even in context, have the potential to leave many important constitutional issues unresolved, hence the need for other evidence of the will of the lawmaker. In particular, this chapter will show that the “summing problem,” which has most often been associated with the difficulty of determining a single intention of the Framers, is matched by its semantic equivalent: the fact that the evidence of objective public meaning can lead to multiple potential meanings. To describe the problem, the chapter analyzes two clauses that have generated a great deal of litigation and interpretive controversy – the tax clauses and the Establishment Clause. In each case, there are multiple equally strong candidates for the objective public meanings of the words.

This chapter demonstrates how seeking the Framers’ intentions by reviewing the debates and drafting history leading to the final versions of the Constitution can resolve the semantic summing problem in the case of two highly contested and frequently litigated clauses: the tax clauses and the Establishment Clause. In doing so, it shows how, in practice, a search for the Framers’ intentions – that is, the end–means policy choices they made – can be done in light of the nature of the documentary record, and how it can resolve otherwise difficult interpretive tasks for which public meaning approaches are inadequate. In these cases, there is also evidence that the Framers’ understandings were known to the ratifiers and the public, and thus point to the meanings that were likely to have been understood by the those groups as well.

The principle, extent and modalities pursuant to which States allow foreign investors to undertake economic activities over their territory depend mainly on domestic economic and social considerations. Host States strike a balance between conflicting interests and objectives, namely their economic development on the one hand, and the protection of a range of other domestic interests, on the other. Beyond the promotion and facilitation of foreign investments that constitutes a common teleological denominator of international investment agreements, treaty practice displays some diversity in relation to admission and establishment. This diversity reflects different balances struck by States parties between the above-mentioned interests and objectives and, more generally, between liberal and protectionist policies. Chapter 4 provides a study of this treaty practice. It examines briefly the promotion and facilitation of foreign investments before analysing in detail admission and establishment matters.

Like Part II of the textbook more generally, Chapter 3 focuses on the substantive rules that protect foreign investments and public interests, as they are contained in international investment agreements (IIAs), and in particular in those agreements concluded in the 2010s. This focus allows for not only a contemporary view on the content of IIAs, but also offers a comprehensive overview of the substantive rules that form part of treaty practice. Indeed, the rules contained in the IIAs concluded over the second half of the twentieth century focus on the substantive protection and treatment of foreign investments and investors. Although these rules have evolved in the IIAs concluded since that time, they have not disappeared. In addition, new rules have emerged in recent treaty practice that aim at the protection of public interests. This chapter introduces the rules that pertain to these objects, providing an explanation of the specific rationale for each rule as well as their main features. A more detailed analysis of the most important rules and the legal issues that arise from them is provided in the subsequent chapters.

This chapter deals with the enforcement of the international rules applying to the initial process of entry by analysing the possibilities and strategies of adjudication under the GATS and the dispute resolution systems of International Investment Agreements. The chapter initially evaluates whether investor-state arbitration (ISA) can be strategically used to enforce disputes when there is no investment yet. Then, it assesses the potential of state-state dispute settlement mechanisms for investment disputes. This is followed by an evaluation of the jurisdiction of the WTO DSB, especially when it comes to the enforcement of GATS provisions in mode 3. This panorama will set the ground to explain the recent innovative approaches taken by the current treaties and negotiations on the subject, illustrated by the services and establishment chapters of the EU-Canada FTA (CETA). Finally, the chapter tests to what extent the interaction in this area provides evidence of a gradual move towards a specific type of enforcement. The chapter concludes that state actors are progressively adopting convergent approaches in adjudication, at least with respect to the entry of investors in services.

Microbes provide a diverse source of functional traits that can be used to address a whole range of human and environmental problems, from agriculture and farming, to human and wildlife health, and energy production and climate change mitigation. Although microbes and their derivatives have been used for decades in some contexts, recent advances in sequencing and other technologies have allowed us to identify and understand novel sources and applications. Here, we review a range of different types of microbial biotechnology, including probiotics or microbial inputs, prebiotics, enzybiotics, microbiome transplants, antimicrobial peptides and secondary metabolites, across a range of contexts including human health, agriculture, biofuel production and wildlife disease, among others. We discuss the advances made in these fields, along with the complexities and problems associated with success. We also comment on ethical issues surrounding the use of microbial biotechnology and areas of policy and risk assessment that will need to develop to promote safe implementation.

The concept is broached of mid-twentieth-century British Christianity as in a battle, comprising five core zones of engagement. These were: the struggle of conservative religionists to impose upon the people ignorance about sex; the effort of licensing authorities to control leisure venues; the struggle between churches and their agents against Humanists, secularists, agnostics and atheists over the theocratic stranglehold of moral law; the contest waged by Humanists to release the Christian grip upon moral and ethical broadcasting at the BBC; and, with the collapse of the conservative moral regime in the 1960s, the discreet tussle erupting between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church for the baton of moral leadership. These struggles undergird the book’s key interventions – to enlarge religion in cultural history, reasserting the reality of secularisation in the British establishment and pinpointing Humanists as the pioneers in progressive medical legislation. Reviews follow of existing narratives of the 1950s and 1960s in transatlantic and British historiography, emphasising the importance of parallel North American experience in the history of sex and religion.