Consent-​Based Rape Leg­is­la­tion in Prac­tice

Consent-​Based Rape Leg­is­la­tion in Prac­tice: Chal­leng­ing Ju­di­cial Core Val­ues

Vis­it­ing Group

No­vem­ber 2023

This project, which will re­sult in a pub­li­ca­tion, of­fers unique in­sights into legal pro­fes­sional rea­son­ing on the im­ple­men­ta­tion of a consent-​based
rape law and how it chal­lenges taken-​for-granted legal prac­tice. De­vel­op­ing the ar­gu­ment that mod­ern legal in­sti­tu­tions build on dated un­der­stand­ings of ra­tio­nal­ity, ob­jec­tiv­ity, and in­di­vid­ual au­ton­omy, the con­venors demon­strate that when legal ac­tors pro­ceed with rape cases as if they were or­di­nary crim­i­nal cases, trans­parency, pre­dictabil­ity, and equal­ity be­fore the law, de­creases, ul­ti­mately ren­der­ing the rape law in­ef­fec­tive and re­duc­ing its de­mo­c­ra­tic le­git­i­macy.

Fram­ing the analy­sis with a com­bined fem­i­nist legal and so­ci­ol­ogy of emo­tions per­spec­tive the au­thors argue that legal ra­tio­nal­ity is emotive-​cognitive and legal ob­jec­tiv­ity is a sit­u­ated process re­quir­ing skilled emo­tion work and em­pathic imag­i­na­tion. In­di­vid­u­als, al­though they can be held re­spon­si­ble for their ac­tions, are em­bed­ded in so­cial and re­la­tional con­texts, which is par­tic­u­larly cru­cial to pon­der in cases in­volv­ing sex­ual in­ter­ac­tions. For consent-​based rape laws to be ef­fec­tive, pre­dictable, and equal, legal pro­fes­sion­als there­fore need train­ing in crit­i­cally re­flect­ing on their own po­si­tion­al­ity, val­ues, and ex­pe­ri­ences; in emo­tional re­flex­iv­ity and the work­ing of em­pa­thy; in how sit­u­ated and struc­tural power dy­nam­ics in­flu­ence peo­ple’s ac­tion and be­hav­iour.