Norway and Sweden are lauded as highly gender-equal countries, however, sexual violence persists as a significant problem in both countries. While Sweden introduced consent-based rape legislation in 2018, Norway is in the process of revising its current, coercion-based rape legislation. Drawing on expressive law theory, this paper seeks to disentangle how a consent-based legal reform affects perceived social norms and individual attitudes on sexual consent. Given that states employ rape legislation as a measure not only to sanction, but to prevent unwanted sexual behavior from happening in the first place – it is important to understand how the communication of a law matters for its expressive function. This paper compares how representative samples of Norwegian and Swedish citizens view sexual consent across two time periods. To ascertain whether there is an overall effect of a consent-based legal reform, I employ a difference-in-differences design to examine whether there is a shift in perceived social norms and attitudes among Norwegian respondents after the rape legislation revision. Implementing a survey experiment in both countries, I test whether the effect of additional information about the contents of the rape law and its implications modifies perceived social norms and individual attitudes on sexual consent. If the 2018 legislative change to consent-based rape legislation in Sweden shifted social norms and individual attitudes on sexual consent, the treatment effects should be smaller in Sweden than in Norway.