8/30/2023 0 Comments Freedom of assembly amendment![]() ![]() Public property belonged to the government, Holmes said, not to the people at all. (the son of a founder of this magazine, and then a state judge) briskly dismissed the idea of expressive rights on public property. By the end of the 19th century, no less an authority than Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. The right of assembly had a rough go for the first century and a half of the Constitution. When the new American government was formed, the Second Congress enacted the Militia Act, a more limited law governing “unlawful assembly.” Federal authorities could use force to break up assemblies only if they amounted to “insurrections”-and the act had to be invoked by the president himself, not by his appointees. Officials were granted immunity if any of the “rioters” were “killed, maimed or hurt.” ![]() If the crowd did not disperse within an hour, the authorities could disperse them by force. Our sovereign lord the King chargeth and commandeth all persons, being assembled, immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their habitations, or to their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the act made in the first year of King George, for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies. If 12 or more subjects of the king assembled, any royal jack-in-office could “read them the riot act”: Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes: The law-enforcement abuses that don’t bother Trumpĭuring the 18th century, the British crown looked with disfavor on what was then called “the people out of doors”-ordinary people assembled to discuss their grievances, or to ask their rulers to address them. The show of force that swept peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., last night was an assault-and perhaps only one of a series of assaults-on that right. The right of assembly is an important First Amendment right, one treasured by the founding generation and the First Congress, which wrote the amendment, and one re-won two centuries later at great pain by the labor, civil-rights, and anti-war movements. The contrast is striking: On May 28, Donald Trump demanded the First Amendment right of free speech for himself on privately owned social media, and then, four days later, declared war on the people, gathered on public property, as they sought, in the words of the amendment itself, “to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” ![]()
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