What can contract law learn from #MeToo?
| Published date | 01 June 2022 |
| Author | RENATA GROSSI |
| Date | 01 June 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12358 |
DOI: ./j ols.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
What can contract law learn from #MeToo?
RENATA GROSSI
Faculty of Law, University of Technology
Sydney, PO Box , Broadway, Sydney,
NSW , Australia
Correspondence
Renata Grossi, Faculty of Law,University
of Technology Sydney,PO Box ,
Broadway,Sydney, NSW , Australia
Email: renata.grossi@uts.edu.au
Abstract
In this article, I ask whether contract law can learn any-
thing from the #MeToo discussions of consent. When
we juxtapose consent in these two contexts, two issues
emerge. The first is whether consent is a valuable ethical
tool in helping us to determine whether an agreement is
‘good’. This article argues that just as patriarchy makes
a mockery of consent in negotiating sexual encounters,
so too do free market economics make a mockery of
consent and freedom to contract. The second issue
is whether consent should be understood objectively
or subjectively. While favouring the centralizing of a
subjective approach as #MeToo did, this article also
affirms the critical critique of objectivity and questions
the objectivity/subjectivity dichotomy altogether. This
article ends with a nod towards the theorization of
contract as feminist and as relational.
1 INTRODUCTION
Linda Martìn Alcoff has said that there is a rather ‘wide gulf between contract-based concepts of
consent and the phenomenological features of sexual encounters’. She has argued therefore that
the application of the contract model to these areas of social life is ‘more than a little bizarre’.
And yet the connection is often made. For a very obvious example, consider this. At the height
L. M. Alcoff, Rape and Resistance () .
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits
use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or
adaptations are made.
© The Authors. Journalof Law and Societypublished by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Cardiff University (CU).
J. Law Soc. ;:–. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jols 263
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