Freedom of Assembly and Petition

The last and most frequently neglected rights guaranteed by the First Amendment are the right to assemble and the right to petition the government. While the rights of assembly and petition are intimately connected to the freedom of expression, they are necessarily limited in important ways. In particular, in cases involving the freedom of assembly, the Supreme Court has not given as much weight to individual rights as it does in other First Amendment cases. For example, when a man gave a speech on a public street in New York protesting racial discrimination and a large unruly crowd assembled, the Court ruled that the police were justified in stopping the speech and sending the crowd home (see Feiner v. New York). In that case, the Court gave greater weight to the preservation of public safety and order than it did to the rights of the people to assemble and express themselves in public.

In other ways, however, the Court has upheld the rights of the people to assemble and to have some realm of privacy within the context of their meetings. As noted earlier in this lesson, this was an important right exercised by civil rights activists in the 1960s. Alabama’s efforts to force the NAACP to make public its membership lists, for example, were found unconstitutional. When people assemble peacefully and there is no immediate threat to public safety, the Court has upheld the right to assemble in public places.

Perhaps the most significant of all the rights in the First Amendment is the right to challenge the laws, rules, or actions of government officials or agencies when individuals believe their other rights have not been adequately protected. Without this right, there would be no process by which individuals’ disputes with the government could be aired and resolved. As noted above, the ability to sue the government and challenge the constitutionality of its actions is a fundamental check on the government.