Book Review

Deryck Beyleveld and Roger Brownsword?s new book provides an ambitious and thorough account of the role of consent in the law and, also, as a possible basis for law?s authority. Given only a slight familiarity with the previous work of its authors, the volume?s thoroughness and ambition will come as no surprise. The volume does, however, contain some surprises, two of which are particularly worth noting. One surprise, at least to those of us with our noses to the grindstone of a narrow area of legal doctrine, is the near ubiquity of consent in various areas of legal doctrine. The book serves a useful role just by reminding us of this. A second surprise is the complexity of the notion of consent itself, for Beyleveld and Brownsword are intent on determining the normative power of the notion, including the conditions under which that power can be realised, who can realise it and why it should be thought normatively significant. This, too, is a valuable contribution to our thinking about a fundamental feature of the juristic landscape.