Polar subspaces and automatic maximality

This paper is about certain linear subspaces of Banach SN spaces (that is to say Banach spaces which have a symmetric nonexpansive linear map into their dual spaces). We apply our results to monotone linear subspaces of the product of a Banach space and its dual. In this paper, we establish several new results and also give improved proofs of some known ones in both the general and the special contexts.