On September 28, California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law Senate Bill 967, commonly referred to as the “affirmative consent” bill. It forces state-funded universities to require students to obtain “affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement” before having sex. Once such agreement has been reached, it must remain “ongoing throughout a sexual activity.”

Two opposition articles have appeared in the last few days. One comes from from Shikha Dalmia in an op-ed for The Week: “The vast majority of campus rapes are committed by a small minority of repeat offenders who give not a damn about what the woman wants. And if they can threaten violence, they can also lie about obtaining consent. So how will the law change anything?” she asks.

And in a column published yesterday on New York Magazine’s website, Jonathan Chait says that the law is based on a desire to create “sweeping, wholesale” cultural change which most people are not going to accept anytime in the near future, and that “nobody will actually try to enforce it.”

Chait writes that, instead, “[the law] will technically deem a large portion of sexual encounters to be rape, but prosecutors will only enforce it if there is an accusation. And since most, and possibly near all, sexual encounters will legally be rape [under the new standard], then accusation will almost automatically result in conviction.”

People crusading heedlessly against campus sexual assault confused a minor problem for an epidemic, legislators responded with a law, and now the freedom of every sexually active college student in California has been threatened. How many of the accused will be punished for a sex crime they didn’t commit?

The unintended consequences of this law could be tragic in nature.