Law and Consent: Contesting the Common Sense

Consent is used in many different social and legal contexts with the pervasiveunderstanding that it is, and has always been, about autonomy – but has it?Beginning with an overview of consent’s role in law today, this book investigatesthe doctrine’s inseparable association with personal autonomy and its effectin producing both idealised and demonised forms of personhood and agency.This prompts a search for alternative understandings of consent. Through anexploration of sexual offences in Antiquity, medical practice in the Middle Ages,and the regulation of bodily harm on the present-day sports field, this bookdemonstrates that, in contrast to its common sense story of autonomy, consentmore often operates as an act of submission than as a form of personal freedomor agency. The book explores the implications of this counter-narrative for thelaw’s contemporary uses of consent, arguing that the kind of freedom consent ismeant to enact might be foreclosed by the very frame in which we think aboutautonomy itself.This book will be of interest to scholars of many aspects of law, history, andfeminism as well as students of criminal law, bioethics, and political theory.

About the Author

Karla M. O'Regan is an Associate Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at St. Thomas University, Canada.