2 SENSES OF AUTONOMY

A number of commentators have identified autonomy as a central value o f the First Amendment. In this essay, Professor Fallon argues that the two leading conceptions of autonomy, positive and negative liberty, a re overly simple and flawed. He argues that autonomy-based First Amend ment theory should recognize two alternative conceptions: descriptive autonomy, which considers the impact of external causal factors on ind ividual liberty, and ascriptive autonomy, which represents each person 's sovereignty over her moral choices. Professor Fallon introduces a f our-part framework to gauge the extent to which a person is descriptiv ely autonomous. He notes that ascriptive autonomy is less analytically neat, but argues that the concept is also important to First Amendmen t jurisprudence because it ''reflects an aspect of human self-understa nding that descriptive autonomy fails to capture. '' Professor Fallon then explores the moral and policy issues that arise from distinguishi ng descriptive from ascriptive autonomy, concluding that both notions of autonomy are fundamental to the First Amendment. He warns, however, that because descriptive and ascriptive autonomy often pull in opposi te directions, autonomy-based arguments frequently complicate rather t han simplify First Amendment debates.