Amendment I: Freedom of Assembly

[The2ndWheel]

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1205-22.htm

While the great battles fought over the First Amendment's religion and free-speech/-press clauses are some of the most inspiring stories told 'round the legal campfire, the amendment's assembly and petition clauses are mostly a forgotten footnote.

There has been no great legal battle in easy memory over the right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." In 1939, the Supreme Court decided a case, Hague v. Congress of Industrial Organizations, that definitively established "the right of the people peaceably to assemble" in public space, and there's been little discussion since.

Yet both these First Amendment footnotes offer important lessons about the more subtle--and what today are more crucial--obstacles to meaningful democracy that come with our economic system.

[phantom power]

1. The observation about disappearing public spaces was interesting.

Yet the most disturbing threat to freedom of assembly isn't from the ways in which police officers restrict movement in public space, but from the disappearance of public space itself. Our conception of political assembly is rooted in a geography that is increasingly rare--the town square, the public meeting ground, a collective space in which people gather expecting political engagement.

Today the space that is most public is privatized: the shopping mall. If one wanted to distribute a political pamphlet and engage fellow citizens in conversation about the issues of the day, the mall would be the optimal site--a place where people of all ages and classes gather for commercial and social purposes.

But while the mall is a very public place in some senses, it is private property and hence not governed by the First Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to impose on the owners of these public spaces the requirement to honor people's assembly and speech rights there (though they left the door open for states to find such a right in their own constitutions). When our lives in public are increasingly conducted in privatized space, are conventional understandings of "public" and "private" adequate for a democracy?

[BJW]

2. Thx for posting this