Say a reason to ø is legal just in case at least a part of the reason is the fact that ø-ing is legally required. This paper is about the widely accepted claim that legal reasons have a certain distinctive formal property—content-independence. I argue that, on two important interpretations, this claim is false. It is false either because legal reasons contingently lack the relevant property or because no reason lacks it. I also argue that, given these two interpretations, content-independence could (...) not be a property of singular legal reasons. (shrink)

I argue that Nafsika Athanassoulis fails to establish the main contention of her paper ), namely that, given liberalism, consent should be a defence to a charge of assault occasioning actual bodily harm even when the harm is a consequence of a sado-masochistic encounter.