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Acquiescence is accepting something without protest, which may prevent legal recourse later. Silence can be considered consent in some situations, so it’s important to object. Mutual acquiescence can change property boundaries. In civil cases, acquiescence can result in losing legal remedies.
In legal terms, acquiescence refers to accepting something without protest. Depending on the situation, a lack of objection at the time may mean that someone has no legal recourse to rectify the situation at a later date, because it will be argued that something should have been said at that time if there was a problem. It is important that people are aware of situations in which compliance may affect them and that they take steps to avoid being disenfranchised by not objecting.
Compliance is characterized by passive consent. If people believe something is inappropriate or infringes on their rights and do not speak or move to stop the infringer, their silence is considered consent in some legal situations. For this reason, people are often advised to file an objection even if they allow someone to do something, establishing for the record that something has been done against their objections.
In a situation known as mutual acquiescence, people reach a state of passive mutual consent. This most commonly occurs in the case of boundary disputes between two properties. If two property owners live side by side and regard a fence as a property boundary for an extended period of time when the boundary is actually somewhere else, it can be argued that the boundary has changed due to mutual acquiescence. This is not the same as adverse tenure, in which an owner seeks to reclaim property rights by knowingly moving a fence or similar object to change another owner’s perception of the boundary.
This is a concern primarily in civil cases. In criminal cases, silence on the part of the victim does not deprive the victim of future legal rights. Part of the reason for this is that in many regions of the world criminal cases are also considered crimes against society, not just individual victims, and are tried differently, with the government bringing charges against the accused, rather than a citizen who intends another. Civil cases are matters between individuals, and therefore it is possible for someone to lose an opportunity for a legal remedy through acquiescence.
Thus, in an example such as a business failing to aggressively defend its copyright upfront, the business could lose its rights in civil court on the argument that failure to make an early protest constituted acquiescence .
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