Unlearning Agreement: Imagining the Law without Consent 1

Will is central to law and is operationalised through consent. This means that in several areas of law, consent is an important part of norm creation and interpretation, and its presence or absence can be the defining element of several crimes. Therefore, understanding consent is an important part of legal education and law students must grapple with the contours of consent at various points of their time at law school. The content of consent is not neutral, however, and it reflects the experiences of those that make and teach the law. Furthermore, the way that lawyers are taught consent impacts the way that we practise law and the way in which new law is made and taught. In this chapter, I look at the ways in which I was taught consent in law school and how that teaching clashed with my experiences as a woman from the Global South. It was not until I began to challenge the unspoken privileges that infuse the understanding of consent I was taught, that I was able to imagine a different substance to many branches of law, a substance that was more concerned with fairness than with agreement.