Consent by Extension

Abstract

Abstract Many failed attempts have tried to tie the obligation to obey the law from consent. This chapter explores three more, all of which also fail. One is to derive implicit consent from the ‘nature of the business’ of either politicians standing for office or voters casting ballots. A second asserts a logical entailment between engaging in a collective decision procedure and the outcome of that procedure constituting a binding collective decision (‘a collective decision’ may be analytic, whether morally binding is a wholly separate question). Neither does consent to lower-order rules necessarily logically imply consent to higher-order rules. At most consenting to something becoming law by voting in an election or a legislature may pragmatically imply consent to the institutional infrastructure required to make that law-on-the-ground.