ABSTRACT
Legal consent comes in two distinct forms: prescriptive consent; and imputed consent. A given subject S ‘prescriptively consents’ to x when she actually chooses x in certain ways as that which she desires for herself under the circumstances-whether she does so subjectively in her mind under such conditions of competence, knowledge, freedom and motivation as the jurisdiction deems sufficient to satisfy S’s legitimate interests regarding x , or she does so objectively by expression under such conditions of communication and such apparent conditions of competence, knowledge, freedom and motivation as the jurisdiction deems sufficient to cause observers reasonably to believe that S’s legitimate interests in x are satisfied. And a subject S is ‘imputed’ to consent to x when she engages in conduct or possesses a state of mind from which the jurisdiction deems it appropriate to construct a fiction of her having prescriptively consented to x.
