Chapter 4 examines communicative settings where the use of machine translation is particularly likely to involve high levels of risk. The chapter looks at guidelines about machine translation use and at the issue of consent. Two types of consent are examined, namely using machine translation to seek some type of consent, and consent that concerns whether the use of machine translation itself is consensual. The chapter then explores some of the direct reasons why machine translation is used in high-risk scenarios. These reasons include urgency, service user preferences and unreliable human language services. The project’s participating professionals were not short of stories to tell about human interpreters who had not turned up for appointments or telephone interpreting connections that frequently crashed. Incidents of this nature are considered within a broader context where limited resources and outsourced human language services normalise the reliance on machine translation in ways that increase risks and affect standards of care.

This chapter considers the law of treaties in the light primarily of the key Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, 1969, much of which is considered as part of customary law. The chapter discusses the role and nature of international treaties in the light of their binding nature upon states parties (pacta sunt servanda). The making of treaties, from the formalities and methods of consent from signature to ratification, is covered before the chapter turns to reservations. The nature of reservations and their effect upon third parties is addressed is addressed as is the process of amendment of treaties. Consideration of treaty interpretation then follows with the various methodologies examined from the textual, intention and object, and purpose of the treaty points of view, with a careful look at case law. The particular position of human rights treaties in this process is noted. The chapter then turns to the invalidity, termination and suspension of treaties, including a discussion of the concepts of peremptory norms (jus cogens), material breach, supervening impossibility of performance and fundamental change of circumstances (rebus sic stantibus).

The rise of the #MeToo movement has prompted a public reckoning with sexual consent, with public discourse now squarely focused on issues of sexual coercion and culpability. However, the principle of consent has a much longer history and wider significance beyond recent events. Bolstered by a social contract model that prioritises individual personhood and the protection of private property, consent has been central to the development of modern law and liberal societies (Munro, 2008). As feminist legal scholar Vanessa Munro argues, in Western legal settings, it ‘demarcate[s] the terrain between acceptable and unacceptable intrusions upon property / bodies’ (Munro, 2008, pp. 923–4) and accredits the liberal subject with its defining features of individuality, rationality and autonomy. In the specific context of sexual violence, consent is endowed with significant power (Hindes, 2022): it is used to arbitrate legal disputes over sexual assault and violence, and determine whether violation has occurred.

Defences play a critical role in tort law by allowing courts to balance individual rights with broader considerations of justice and social policy. For example, a person who acts in self-defence or under necessity may interfere with another’s rights in a way that would ordinarily be unlawful, but their actions may be justified by the circumstances. Similarly, defences like consent or statutory authorisation reflect the idea that liability should not arise where the plaintiff has permitted the interference or where the defendant is acting in accordance with the law. Without defences, the law would be overly rigid, punishing conduct that, in context, may be entirely reasonable or socially acceptable.

In this chapter we begin by discussing the distinction between a denial of liability and a defence. A denial of liability challenges whether the plaintiff has proven the elements of the tort, whereas a defence assumes that the elements are satisfied but provides a justification or excuse for the defendant’s actions.

This Chapter explores how consent to sexual activity can be vitiated for the purposes of sexual offences where the defendant has engaged in an operative deception as to biological sex. It offers a defence of the current legal doctrine, drawing upon Chloë Kennedy’s theory of consent vitiation by identity non-recognition. The central argument is that the current law correctly identifies that homosexual sexual activity is of a different sexual nature to heterosexual activity and is of central importance to the formation of sexual orientation and sexual identity, particularly for lesbians and gay men. An operative deception as to biological sex is sufficiently proximate to the sexual nature of the activity in question that it is capable of vitiating consent. In contrast, Alex Sharpe argues that the privacy of transgender people should take precedence over the sexual integrity of others and that sexual boundaries based on biological sex are transphobic and prejudiced, equivalent to racism. For this reason, Sharpe argues that transgender people should be immune to the criminal law of sex by deception as to sex. The chapter concludes by critiquing this view and defending the importance of sexual orientation for the freedom and capacity of people to choose to engage in sexual activity.

This chapter begins by introducing a number of foundational concepts, which serve as the starting point in the field of public international law. Section 1.1 begins with the notion that states are sovereign equals and must consent to be bound by international law. This section also introduces the critical distinction that international law makes between states and ‘non-state actors’. Section 1.2 discusses the inevitable comparison of public international law with domestic legal systems, and the significant limitations of this analogy as a means for understanding the field of public international law. Section 1.3 introduces the subject of the relationship between international and domestic law. Section 1.4 concludes by explaining this book’s overarching structure as well as the approach of this book to the introduction of public international law.

This chapter focuses on the rules set out in the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT). This chapter begins with the concept of a treaty, before discussing treaty-making, with a particular focus on the conclusion of treaties, their entry into force, and reservations to treaties. The chapter then delves into how treaties operate, namely their scope of application and their interpretation. Finally, this chapter looks at the invalidity, suspension, and termination of treaties.

This chapter examines the broad legal framework governing sexual offences by examining the selected offences of rape and sexual assault, which provide a foundation for understanding other sexual offences. This chapter will also briefly discuss sexual offences against vulnerable individuals such as children. Finally, the chapter considers the challenge that technology increasingly poses in the area of sexual offences and considers how technology may facilitate traditional forms of offending or create new forms of offending.

Chapters 6 and 7 dealt with the substantive requirements of the torts of trespass to the person and trespass to property and goods. This chapter deals with the defences and remedies available to those actions.Defences to trespass based on self-help include the defences of self-defence or defence of another, defence of property, necessity or abatement. Defences based on justification are consent and the exercise of disciplinary powers. There is a fault-based defence of inevitable accident. Provocation, mistake, contributory negligence and the incapacity of the defendant are not defences to trespass.The remedies available for trespass to the person include damages (nominal, compensatory, aggravated and exemplary) and injunctions.

Elizabeth Bowen’s fiction is full of girls; in nearly all her work, she focuses on the act of maturing through adolescence to early adulthood. The experience of girlhood among Bowen’s characters maps onto the generic characteristics of her truncated, ambiguous Bildungsromane, all of which subvert expectations and resist satisfying maturation. Her novels focus on figures experiencing historical and emotional arrest, and her adolescent girls often remain in moments of developmental or social suspension. This essay traces girlhood and adolescence in abeyance in Bowen’s short fiction, and in novels ranging from The Hotel to The Death of the Heart to The Little Girls.

Contract and consent had important roles in early modern English labor relationships. The scholarship in social and economic history and legal studies has rarely tried to reconcile the legal framework of voluntariness with the practical unfreedom of early modern work. The Introduction proposes that the foundations of freedom of contract and the sanctity of an individual’s consent developed in the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, in part, from the exploitative labor systems of parish apprenticeship, transatlantic indentured servitude, military impressment, and prisoner of war labor. Charity, colonization, and war were the key factors that drove masters and middlemen to reach for consent as a tool to bind people into labor. The ideology of "natural laborers" justified presuming consent in people of appropriate profiles. Moments of consenting were fraught with power imbalances, and they reinscribed social hierarchies. Contemporary examples of coerced consent show an ongoing acceptance of this pairing. The legal context, chapter summaries, and a consideration of the method of historicizing consent complete the Introduction.

Brokers and ship captains sent thousands of people from the British Isles to work in the English American colonies without indentures. These immigrants only entered written contracts after arrival. Here – and in other labor arrangements in England – the concept of “enticement” dominated. Subordinates’ consent to serve was imagined to be the result of campaigns of temptation to which they succumbed. While previous studies of enticement in early modern England have been limited to sexual seduction, at the time enticement also meant servant poaching. Claims of enticement allowed commentators to emphasize the power of personal interactions in servant procurement, instead of drawing attention to the structural conditions that made a segment of society disproportionately vulnerable to abuse by illicit brokers denounced as "spirits."

Guild and craft apprentices had entered written contracts (indentures) with their masters and mistresses since the late medieval era in England. Consent in these relationships was not a matter of great anxiety, and the documents treated the topic with minimal concern. From the 1570s, English parish officers adopted these indentures for the new system of parish apprenticeship. They carefully archived masters’ written consent for future reference, to help ensure that better-off householders fulfilled their roles in providing for the poor children bound to them. A small number of parish apprenticeship indentures included new “free will clauses,” which stated that the pauper child in question had offered free and willing consent to serve. Although little contemporary commentary exists on the matter, parish officers likely inserted such language as a defense against suspicions that they had excessively coerced poor children to enter unwanted labor contracts. The chapter concludes with a case study of a guild apprentice whose gentry status protected him from recruitment into colonial servitude.

The recruitment of men into armies had its counterpart in the placement of soldiers taken captive during war – and these, too, took place on the edge of consent. Customary laws of war prohibited hard labor for Christian prisoners of war. Yet a succession of English governments sent their European war captives into servitude with private masters. These governments and their collaborators instead operated under the logic of the English Poor Law, in which the indigent could meaningfully consent to serve a master even while under duress. The case of Scottish and Dutch prisoners of war in an East Anglian fen drainage project from 1648 to 1653 shows how the Council of State and the drainage company board members conceptualized lower-status prisoners as willing workmen. The broader arena of transatlantic and intra-European coercion of prisoner of war labor throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries further reveals how the discourse of consent permeated even those more convoluted international relations.

The Conclusion reviews the argument that English masters and brokers wielded consent as a tool of labor coercion in the early modern period. Presumptions, shaped by people’s age, gender, and social status, determined if consent had been given or not. While the subjects of this book largely aimed to stabilize their social worlds, their use of consent in labor relationships often had the opposite effect. In the discourse of enticement, individuals bore the burden of choosing correctly in a labor market where structural inequalities exposed some people to jobs that most would never accept. The conclusion further considers methods and sources for the history of consent. The connected study of charity, colonization, and war has allowed the identification of trends in contract labor coercion that might otherwise be seen as aberrations. The book ends by considering how captured consent was meaningful in the past and continues to have a significant legacy.

The treatment of alleged “spiriting” victims in London courts versus colonial American courts further reveals presumptions of consent to work. The lower courts in London offered redress to people targeted by illicit transatlantic servant brokers when they escaped before transportation. Early modern notions about how people’s behavior flowed from their intentions meant that contemporaries sympathized with rescued or escaped spiriting victims in London precisely because they had avoided transportation. By contrast, spirited servants who arrived in the colonies struggled to shift the perception that the mere fact of their arrival indicated that they had wanted to come. The colonial magistrates presumed that newly arrived servants had been complicit in their own transportation and oversaw the belated creation of servants’ indentures. Far fewer servants found redress for spiriting in the colonies than in London, because of this presumption and further procedural obstacles.

From the 1610s in London, servant brokers, merchants, and eventually justices of the peace and their clerks recorded consent to transatlantic colonial indentured servitude with heightened attention. In doing so, they were responding to the vastness of the distances servants crossed, compounded with the multi-year length of their contractual terms and the unlikeliness of the servants returning home. The assignability of these contracts further differentiated them from the contemporaneous forms of indentured labor. In this newer system, contracts more often specified the voluntary nature of servants’ agreement with a free will clause, precisely because their willingness seemed implausible. The treatment of different categories of recruits, including adults, children, convicts, and paupers, are compared. Unwilling recruits could sometimes secure their release before the ships departed England. Sealed indentures made escape far less achievable.