Autonomy in Law
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Description
Autonomy is a core value in American public and private law, since it is one of the constitutive ingredients of the generative idea of background rights of the person to which interpretive controversy in American law characteristically appeals. In this essay, I first develop a general theoretical account of how and why autonomy in American constitutional law connects to a larger moral and political conception of self-governing agents, and then focus the account on two concrete interpretive debates in law: the scope of liability in the criminal law and the constitutional guarantees of the First Amendment. I build accordingly a conception of autonomy in the following stages: the minimally adequate internal capacities of agency required as threshold conditions for criminal responsibility, the external conditions of full criminal responsibility, and the richer framework of external conditions required by the guarantees of the First Amendment. The central focus of my argument is on the distinctive force of these latter guarantees.
Source Publication
The Inner Citadel: Essays on Individual Autonomy
Source Editors/Authors
John Christman
Publication Date
1989
Recommended Citation
Richards, David A. J., "Autonomy in Law" (1989). Faculty Chapters. 1921.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1921
