Academic

Inazu on Freedom of Assembly

By Lawrence Solum

John D. Inazu (Duke University School of Law) has posted Liberty's Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly (Yale University Press, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

This paper is the introduction to the forthcoming book Liberty's Refuge: The Forgotten Assembly.

The freedom of assembly has been at the heart of some of the most important social movements in American history: antebellum abolitionism, women?s suffrage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the labor movement in the Progressive Era and after the New Deal, and the Civil Rights movement. Claims of assembly stood against the ideological tyranny that exploded during the first Red Scare in the years surrounding the Great War and the second Red Scare of 1950s McCarthyism. Abraham Lincoln once called the right of assembly part of ?the Constitutional substitute for revolution.? In 1939, the popular press heralded it as one of the ?four freedoms? at the core of the Bill of Rights. And even as late as 1973, John Rawls characterized it as one of our ?basic liberties.? But in the past thirty years, the freedom of assembly has become little more than a historical footnote in American political theory and law. Some believe that assembly has been subsumed into the freedoms of speech and association and that we are none for the worse. Others think we are better off without meaningful protections for group autonomy because they undercut antidiscrimination norms that underwrite modern civil rights statutes. Liberty?s Refuge argues that these views could not be more wrong. Our right to assemble - to form relationships, to gather, to exist as groups of our choosing - is fundamental to liberty and meaningful pluralism. Drawing from resources in constitutional law, political theory, and history, this book argues for a return to the freedom of assembly and the destabilizing difference that it brings.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on October 18, 2010 (boomark / email).