ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the contemporary ‘canon’ of consent law in the three legal areas of focus of the book: namely consent to sex, informed consent to medical treatment, and consent to bodily harm in sport. This contemporary picture of consent focusses on three ‘preconditions’ of consent that dominate the jurisprudence in criminal and medical law: voluntariness, rationality, and knowledge. These key components are discussed within the context of long-standing debates about legal paternalism and state interference in the decision-making capacity of ‘free’ individuals. While many scholars have criticised the way consent’s preconditions have been applied by the courts, these accounts leave the meaning of consent (as autonomy) uncontested, revealing both the dominance of consent’s autonomy narrative and its central contradiction: despite proclamations of universality, consent is a highly regulated sphere of freedom that is only available to certain kinds of subjects who act in certain kinds of ways. The latter half of the chapter examines the contributions of classical liberal scholars (such as John Locke) to the establishment of consent’s autonomy story, its common sense status, and its relationship to contemporary norms of intelligibility.
