What is the First Amendment right to assembly?

0:04One thing when you look at assembly, and you step back for a minute, you realize assembly of those five rights and is the only one that requires more than one person to be exercised, so I can speak by myself, I can petition the government alone, I can in some religions, be religious by myself, I can start a press by myself, but I can't assemble alone, it requires at least two people. So there's something about that togetherness of people that's embedded in assembly. Probably the most obvious version of assembly is the physical gathering or the protest and the idea that people are together in person. But then also, the predicate to that gathering in person, which is also and often about the groups that we form.

0:44But separate from assembly is this right to petition the government for a redress of grievances, the idea that the people should always be able to have a vehicle or a mechanism to say to the government, we think we've been wronged, we need to have our right to redress, and so a separate guarantee of that. One of the problems with our historical understanding of the Constitution is that for many years assembly and petition were squeezed together and understood to be a singular right. I think the best way to think of this is when you look at assembly and petition together to think about the opportunity or the breathing space for people to dissent. The ability to voice discontent, the ability to criticize government, which is so important in a democracy and often, as we see, not just historically, but around the world today,

1:30suppressed by more controlling regimes, so the idea that we are going to have this guarantee to gather as people apart from the government and to petition our grievances and redresses when doing so, and both of those, lots of historical examples where that hasn't been honored.