Legal Temporalities of Sexual Consent

Explores law’s constructions of time, illuminating key problems for sexual consent law and offering potential solutions.

• Presents a fresh and comprehensive approach to a challenging and controversial area of law
• Explores current debates on sexual consent, its deployment in criminal law, and underlying approaches to gender, sexuality, autonomy and agency
• Adopts temporalities as a framework for evaluating issues and potential legal reforms
• Offers an approach relevant to common law jurisdictions beyond England and Wales and areas of criminal law
• Argues for changes in the court's interpretation of the Sexual Offences Act 2003

This book offers new perspectives on two key themes: the criminal law of sexual consent and the temporalities of law. It uses detailed feminist analysis to investigate how the kinds of time produced by statutes and court decisions are vital to constructing the gendered, liberal, legal subject. By shedding light upon a contested and multi-faceted legal issue, it demonstrates that more expansive temporalities are the precondition for a richer, relational understanding of consent.

This book’s fresh approach to sexual consent is developed using the law of England and Wales but is relevant to all jurisdictions where consent is an element of sexual offences law. Its distinctive approach to legal temporalities has the potential to be applied to other areas of law, providing insight into both current law and possibilities for reform.