I begin my analysis of consent by agreeing with Professor Hurd that consent functions as a “moral transformative” by altering the obligations and permissions that determine the Tightness of others' actions. I further agree with her that consent is intimately related to the capacity for autonomous action; one who cannot alter others' obligations through consent is not fully autonomous. I cannot improve on her elaboration of these points.

This article examines a thesis of interest to social epistemology and some articulations of First Amendment legal theory: that a free market in speech is an optimal institution for promoting true belief. Under our interpretation, the market-for-speech thesis claims that more total truth possession will be achieved if speech is regulated only by free market mechanisms; that is, both government regulation and private sector nonmarket regulation are held to have information-fostering properties that are inferior to the free market. After discussing possible counterexamples to the thesis, the article explores the actual implications of economic theory for the emergence of truth in a free market for speech. When confusions are removed about what is maximized by perfectly competitive markets, and when adequate attention is paid to market imperfections, the failure of the market-for-speech thesis becomes clear. The article closes by comparing the properties of a free market in speech with an adversarial system of discourse.

What is distinctive about a feminist analysis of law? Conversely, what does it mean to characterize the law (or a law) as distinctively “male” as a way of criticizing its injustice? It is widely assumed by both feminist scholars and nonfeminists or curious onlookers that a feminist analysis of law must have distinctive features that set it off from mainstream/“malestream” theories of law. Feminist scholars often try to “sell” feminist analysis to interested newcomers and try to break down the recalcitrance of those who seem to want to marginalize and dismiss it precisely by claiming a difference of perspective for feminist analysis of which no well-educated lawyer or legal commentator can afford to be ignorant. Meanwhile, feminist claims are also challenged by those who think they can reach the same conclusion on independent grounds for therefore not being distinctively feminist; “What makes that particularly feminist?” the communitarian, for example, will ask, faced with an argument that feminism is critical of the individualistic bias of the legal system.

Legal and social norms regarding gender relations have undergone dramatic changes in the past 25 years. The changes have come about largely because of the confluence of changing economic and technological realities, the unfolding of the norm dictating equal treatment of individuals, the sexual revolution and its corollaries of improved contraception and legal abortion, the rise of women as a self-conscious group and a presence in the academy, and the interrelations of all of these factors. As men and women have come to share dormitories and workplaces, and as the old mores governing sex—and male-female relations in general—have broken down, there has been struggle and uncertainty over what norms should apply to sexual relations.

Although much legal scholarship discusses the meaning of the religion clauses of the U.S. Constitution, very few articles analyze the ways in which state regulation affects actors' incentives to engage in religious behavior. Yet the question of how a law influences religious behavior is important for determining whether various laws are desirable, and whether they violate constitutional constraints. This article draws on recent economic models of religious organization to analyze the ways in which laws affect the behavior of religious groups. Religious groups produce collective goods for their members, and the effect of laws can be analyzed by examining how they modify the payoffs members receive for cooperating or free riding. The article examines the use of laws to establish religious groups, to subsidize them with cash or tax benefits, to provide accommodations for them, to provide symbolic support for them, to provide secular substitutes for the collective goods they produce, and to regulate disputes between members. The article also briefly discusses the constitutional implications of the analysis.

A little more than two years ago, a Texas woman, faced with a knife-wielding intruder demanding sex from her, tried to talk her attacker into wearing a condom to protect herself against the possibility of contracting AIDS. A grand jury refused to indict the man because jurors believed that the woman's act of self-protection implied that she had consented to sex.

This article has two broad purposes. First, as a political philosopher who has been interested in the concepts of coercion and exploitation, I want to consider just what the analysis of the concept of consent can bring to the question, what sexually motivated behavior should be prohibited through the criminal law? Put simply, I shall argue that conceptual analysis will be of little help. Second, and with somewhat fewer professional credentials, I shall offer some thoughts about the substantive question itself. Among other things, I will argue that it is a mistake to think that sexual crimes are about violence rather than sex and that we need to understand just why the violation of sexual autonomy is a serious wrong. I shall also argue that the principle that “no means no” does not tell us when “yes means yes,” and that it is the latter question that poses the most interesting theoretical difficulties about coercion, misrepresentation, and competence. In addition, I shall make some brief remarks concerning two questions about consent and sexual relations that lie beyond the criminal law: What “consent compromising behaviors” should be regarded as indecent, although not criminal? When should someone consent to sexual relations within an enduring relationship?

There is no escaping the fact that law shapes identity. Laws tells us who we are and where we stand in society. While sometimes benign, such classification can also be a devastatingly powerful instrument of ostracism and subjugation. Legally enforced racial segregation sent a cold and harsh message about what the dominant society thought it meant to be black. The recent backlash against affirmative action resurrects degrading stereotypes and sends old messages wrapped in new code words about racial identity. “English-only” laws and attempts to restrict public support for immigrants define targeted groups as “outsiders,” people who do not belong in America. The acceptance of anti-sodomy laws brands homosexuals as deviant And the slow, grudging history of legal recognition of sexual harassment, the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, and the persistence of the “reasonable man” standard effaces the distinctive experiences of women in society while subjecting all to measurement against a male norm.

Herbert Simon once observed that watching an ant make its way across the uneven surface of a beach, one can easily be impressed—too impressed—with the foresight and complexity of the ant's internal map of the beach. Simon went on to point out that such an attribution of complexity to the ant makes a serious mistake. Most of the complexity is not in the ant but in the beach. The ant is just complex enough to use the features of the beach to find its way.

By building upon Raz's analysis of the spectrum of voluntary obligations, the author produces a typology of agreements, and then assesses the extent to which these different kinds of agreements underpin the common law of contract. While recognizing that the law of contract purports to deal with a broad range of voluntarily undertaken obligations, the typology of agreements suggests that the present law is primarily suited to dealing only with bargains. This suggests that there are situations in which agreements should be legally recognized, but which should not be dealt with by all of the conceptual tools of contract law, for these agreements and voluntary undertakings serve the interests of those undertaking them in significantly different ways than do bargains.

Let me begin by admitting that I am wary of any comprehensive definition of consent. This bias stems from my professional concentration on criminal law, in which nouons of freedom and responsibility play vital roles in a wide range of contexts. In each context, however, one discovers that freedom means something different. A voluntary act is any bodily movement not caused by external force or nervous disorder. On the other hand, a voluntary act, however horrific its results, ordinarily may be punished only if the actor was subjectively aware that the act was wrong. In any event, a voluntary act may be excused as the product of duress if another person procures the actor's cooperation in the crime by an illegal threat that would overcome the resistance of a person of ordinary firmness.

Proposing and consenting to sex are things that ordinary people manage to do all the time, yet legal regulation of sex seems to be an intractable problem. No one is satisfied with rape law, but no one knows quite what to do about it.

In his interesting comment on my recent article, “The Appeals Process as a Means of Error Correction,” Edward Schwartz makes two criticisms of my analysis. The criticisms have essentially to do with my assumption that an appeals court judge will base his or her decisions only on what happened at trial, and not on any inference that can be drawn from the fact that an appeal was brought. Before explaining why I do not find Schwartz's criticisms problematic, it will be helpful for me to restate the main features of the model that I examined in the article.

Philosophers have long debated whether there is a morally significant difference between acting with the intention of bringing about some state of affairs and acting with the mere awareness that that state of affairs will occur as an unintended side effect of what one is trying to achieve. This controversy is mirrored in the criminal law in a number of places, most notably with respect to the question of whether the mens rea for the crime of murder should require the intent to cause death or only the knowledge that it will occur. In this paper I propose what I believe is a satisfactory way of drawing the intended/foreseen distinction and then argue, contrary to what Duff and others have supposed, that such a distinction does not underwrite a difference in moral or legal culpability. I leave open the possibility, however, that there may be consequentialist reasons for sometimes imposing greater liability in the case of intended harms than in the case of those that are merely foreseen.

During the last 25 years, rape law has undergone a profound transformation, as the articles in this symposium clearly show. To mention just three of the more striking doctrinal reformations: All states have repealed the most egregious aspects of die marital rape exception; most have abandoned the “utmost resistance” requirement; and all have enacted rape shield laws to protect complaining witnesses from intrusive inquiries into their sexual history. All three reforms were the product of feminist agitation, all three were aimed toward the general end of redirecting rape law toward the protection of women's, rather than men's, interests, and all three did, to some degree, broaden and democratize the scope of the law's protection: Wives, prostitutes, promiscuous girls, and women not inclined to risk their deaths by fighting off their rapists “to the utmost” are now protected by the law of rape against sexual assault, at least in theory, and at least to the same degree as non-wives and non-prostitutes, fighters, and virgins. All of this, virtually every contributor to this symposium agrees, is very much to the good.

We regularly wield powers that, upon close scrutiny, appear remarkably magical. By sheer exercise of will, we bring into existence things that have never existed before. With but a nod, we effect the disappearance of things that have long served as barriers to the actions of others. And, by mere resolve, we generate things that pose significant obstacles to others' exercise of liberty. What is the nature of these things that we create and destroy by our mere decision to do so? The answer: the rights and obligations of others. And by what seemingly magical means do we alter these rights and obligations? By making promises and issuing or revoking consent When we make promises, we generate obligations for ourselves, and when we give consent, we create rights for others. Since the rights and obligations that are affected by means of promising and consenting largely define the boundaries of permissible action, our exercise of these seemingly magical powers can significantly affect the lives and liberties of others.

In a recent essay, Donald Dripps advanced what he calls a “commodification theory” of rape, offered as an alternative to understanding rape in terms of lack of consent. Under the “commodification theory,” rape is understood as the expropriation of sexual services, i.e., obtaining sex through “illegitimate” means. One aim of Dripps's effort was to show the inadequacy of consent approaches to understanding rape. Robin West, while accepting Dripps's critique of consent theories, criticizes Dripps's commodification approach. In its place, West suggests a more phenomenological approach.

The author argues that (1) neither Dripps nor West offers convincing critiques of consent-based theories; (2) the alternatives they offer presuppose the vitality of a consent-based approach to understanding rape; and (3) that both Dripps and West consistently conflate more general moral and political issues with that of the nature of rape.

One of the dominant themes of the symposium from which this collection of articles arose was the ontological status of consent. Is consent a particular state of mind? Is it the signification of that state of mind via a conventionally recognized act? Or, is consent a normative concept that evaluates not only the presence of a state of mind or act, but also the appropriateness of that state of mind or act in the particular circumstances?