Already, the Harvard law professor Jeannie Suk has warned that young law teachers are steering away from teaching about sexual offences because it is “not worth the risks of discomfort by students,” and at Harvard some law teachers are considering dropping rape law from their syllabuses. Where Harvard leads, Oxford often follows, but to do so on this issue would be an absurd folly.

The whole point of a university is that it is an institution in which students and academics can engage in free and uninhibited discussion. Nowhere is this more important than in the subject of legal education, which involves much more than being told what the law is.

It is at university that the lawyers and judges of the future ought to be asking the difficult questions that are central to any serious consideration of the law of sexual offending: What does “consent” mean? To what extent can – or should – children or the mentally ill be able to consent to sexual activity? How should complainants and sex offenders be treated by the courts? How does our legal system deal with false allegations? Shying away from questions like this will not produce better lawyers. It will produce a generation of infantilised milquetoasts who believe they have a right to avoid difficult arguments instead of engaging with them; it will help to select exactly the sort of men and women who are least suited to the practice of the law which almost by definition involves having difficult, important and sometimes distressing arguments.