Type: Seminar

Peaceful assemblies have played a key role in bringing about many major social changes. Examples include challenging and ending apartheid, the women’s suffrage movement, bringing to a close colonialism in India, the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, the fall of communist dictatorships and, less successfully, the Arab Spring. But these historically momentous examples of the people outdoors often build on mundane and long-forgotten assemblies (for example, the labor protests against Governor Walker in Wisconsin or the fuel protests that preceded the 2007 ‘Saffron revolution’ in Burma). Indeed, the political importance of public gatherings extends beyond whether groups achieve their particular ends. For participants and for democracies the very presence of citizens gathering together (physically or online) offers opportunities to build social solidarity and collective identities through peer-to-peer experiences of citizenship.
Despite the critical role of public assembly in politics, including democratic politics in the United States, the constitutional right of assembly is underdeveloped, in U.S. and in international law. In the United States, this problem is extreme. There is no separate doctrine of peaceful assembly despite the First Amendment’s explicitly textual enumeration of the right. Instead, those who seek to gather with others are protected by a host of First Amendment doctrines that treat assembly as a lesser form of free expression.
This seminar will explore this dilemma. Its primary focus will be on U.S. constitutional law, exploring the U.S. Supreme Court’s approach to the right of peaceful assembly and the range of doctrines that those who seek to assemble outdoors must navigate. The seminar will, however, go further to situate this law in three ways. First, it will explore different theoretical understandings of assembly and its political functions. Second, it will ground both the theoretical and legal discussion in historical accounts of particular events to provide students with a concrete sense of the variability of assembly. Third, it will compare the U.S. Supreme Court’s approach to the way the right is articulated and implemented in international law.
Professor Tabatha Abu El-Haj