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Objective: to research the right to join in peaceful assembly and petition in the United States of America.Methods: dialectical approach to cognition of social phenomena, allowing to analyze them in historical development and functioning in the context of the totality of objective and subjective factors, which predetermined the following research methods: formal-logical and sociological.Results: the right to join in peaceful assembly and petition is critical to an effective democracy and is at the core of the First Amendment. The assault of peaceful protestors in the pursuit of racial justice is not a new phenomenon, and legislators at the federal and state levels have drafted anti-riot provisions as a measure to target protestors they deem an existential threat to American society. As these provisions have become increasingly prevalent in light of the protests following the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, they have the likelihood of severely chilling the effect on protestors' right to freedom of expression.Scientific novelty: this Note examines these effects, considering the Anti-Riot Act of 1968’s intent to protect the public from violent protestors and, in light of congressional inaction due to ongoing political polarization, asks whether presidential intervention is warranted. More specifically, this Note determines whether the Act's current interpretation meets Congress's intent or subverts the constitutional right to freedom of expression. This Note contends that while persuasive arguments exist both in support for harsher anti-riot provisions and for a novel approach to address public safety, these arguments tend to rely on anecdotal evidence due to the limited scholarship on this topic. Therefore, this Note argues that the president should establish a commission to comprehensively investigate the recent outbreaks of racially motivated protests before potentially moving forward with executive action.Practical significance: the main provisions and conclusions of the article can be used in scientific, pedagogical and law enforcement activities when considering the issues related to the right to join in peaceful assembly and petition.

The universality of the right to petition, in terms of both the broad specification of its subject matter and the group of entities entitled to petition, as well as the specification of the accessible formal requirements for filing petitions, is a challenge at the level of both lawmaking and applying the law. The need arises not only to ensure that an extensive group of entities has the opportunity to file a petition, but also to provide a guarantee that the petition will be processed and considered properly. The subject matter of this article is the analysis of the Polish legal regulations on this, as well as a review of the established practices of filing petitions with the Sejm and the Senate, as well as their comparison with the solutions applied in other countries. The findings indicate that this is a tool of a civil society commonly used in the European Union Member States. It should also be noted that the Polish solutions, as well as the practice of their application, are seen to be particularly targeted at increasing social activity and enabling the use of the potential that is inherent in the citizens, groups of citizens and all forms in which they can interact with each other.

During the Danish cartoons controversy in 2005–2006, a group of ambassadors to Denmark representing eleven predominantly Muslim countries requested a meeting with the Danish Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, to protest against the cartoons. Rasmussen interpreted their viewpoint as one of demanding limits to freedom of speech and he ignored their request for a meeting. Drawing on this case study, the article argues that it is an appropriate, and potentially effective, moral criticism of anyone who is in a position of political power—taking into account reasonable constraints of feasibility and practicality—that they have refused to receive information, ideas, or opinions from individuals, or their representatives, with dissenting viewpoints. The article also articulates one possible theoretical ground for such a moral criticism: that they could be violating a fundamental (cosmopolitan) moral right of people to submit information, ideas, or opinions to those who wield power over them and to be meaningfully heard—a right which can span state borders.

The administrative state is suffering from a crisis of legitimacy. Many have questioned the legality of the myriad commissions, boards, and agencies through which much of our modern governance occurs. Scholars such as Jerry Mashaw, Theda Skocpol, and Michèle Dauber, among others, have provided compelling institutional histories, illustrating that administrative lawmaking has roots in the early American republic. Others have attempted to assuage concerns through interpretive theory, arguing that the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 implicitly amended our Constitution. Solutions offered thus far, however, have yet to provide a deeper understanding of the meaning and function of the administrative state within our constitutional framework. Nor have the lawmaking models of classic legal process theory, on which much of our public law rests, captured the nuanced democratic function of these commissions, boards, and agencies. This Article takes a different tack. It begins with an institutional history of the petition process, drawn from an original database of over 500,000 petitions submitted to Congress from the Founding until 1950 and previously unpublished archival materials from the First Congress. Historically, the petition process was the primary infrastructure by which individuals and minorities participated in the lawmaking process. It was a formal process that more closely resembled litigation in a court than the tool of mass politics that petitioning has become today. The petition process performed an important democratic function in that it afforded a mechanism of representation for the politically powerless, including the unenfranchised. Much of what we now call the modern \"administrative state\" grew out of the petition process in Congress. This Article offers three case studies to track that outgrowth: the development of the Court of Claims, the Bureau of Pensions, and the Interstate Commerce Commission. These case studies supplement dynamics identified previously in the historical literature and highlight the integral role played by petitioning in the early administrative state — a role unrecognized in most institutional histories. Rather than simply historical, this excavation of the petition process is distinctly legal in that it aims to name the petition process and to connect it with the theory and law that structure the practice. Excavating the historical roots of these myriad commissions, boards, and agencies in the petition process provides a deeper functional and textual understanding of the administrative state within our constitutional framework. First, it highlights the function of the administrative state in facilitating the participation of individuals and minorities in lawmaking. By providing a mechanism of representation for individuals and minorities, the \"participatory state\" serves as an important supplement to the majoritarian mechanism of the vote. Second, it offers new historical context against which to read the text of Article I and the First Amendment. This new interpretation could begin to calm discomfort, at least in part, held by textualists and originalists with regard to the administrative state. Lastly, this Article offers a few examples to illustrate how this new interpretation could provide helpful structure to our administrative law doctrine. With its concern over procedural due process rights, administrative law largely reflects the quasi-due process protections offered by the Petition Clause. This Article explores two areas where the Petition Clause could direct a different doctrinal result, arguing for a stronger procedural due process right for petitioners of the administrative state than that offered by Mathews v. Eldridge and arguing against the Supreme Court's decision in INS v. Chadha holding the legislative veto unconstitutional.

Contrary to popular opinion, the Supreme Court has not yet resolved whether lobbying is constitutionally protected. Belying this fact, courts, Congress, and scholars mistakenly assume that lobbying is protected under the Petition Clause. Because scholars have shared the mistaken assumption that the Petition Clause protects the practice of \"lobbying,\" no research to date has looked closely at the Petition Clause doctrine and the history of petitioning in relation to lobbying. In a recent opinion addressing petitioning in another context, the Supreme Court unearthed the long history behind the right to petition and argued for the importance of this history for future interpretation of the Petition Clause. Following the Supreme Court's direction, this Article examines the implications of the history of petitioning for lobbying and, drawing from recent empirical research on lobbying, argues that the way Congress engages with the public through our current lobbying system actually violates the right to petition. At the Founding, and for much of this Nation's history, the right to petition protected a formal, transparent platform for individual—and, in particular, minority—voices to participate in the lawmaking process. Without regard to the number of signers or the political power of the petitioner, petitions received equal process and consideration. This platform allowed both the enfranchised and unenfranchised to gain access to lawmakers on equal footing. Women, African Americans, and Native Americans all engaged in petitioning activity, and Congress attended to each equally. Moving beyond ahistorical, decontextualized interpretations of the Petition Clause, this Article posits that our current lobbying system—wherein access and procedure are informal, opaque, and based on political power—actually violates the right to petition, informal, opaque, and based on political power—actually violates the right to petition, which provided access and formal procedure without respect to the political power of the petitioner. The history of petitioning teaches that affording access to the lawmaking process on the basis of an individual's political power makes as little sense as affording access to courts on such a basis. This history suggests the need for revisiting the Petition Clause doctrine. On the one hand, it argues for a stronger petition right, especially a right to consideration and response. On the other hand, it suggests a narrowed petition right that protects only practices that correspond with the traditional practice of petitioning. Fundamentally, this Article demonstrates that a contextualized understanding of the Petition Clause, grounded in an accurate historical frame, requires comprehensive reform of our lobbying system and a formalization of the petition process in order to preserve our republican form of government.

The 'Constitution' guarantees an equal right to representation for all residents of the nation - citizens and non-citizens, voters and non-voters alike. Yet ongoing political and legal controversies over the appropriate basis for state legislative apportionment and satisfying the \"one person one vote\" doctrine highlight the uncertainty about how the constitutional commitment to universal representation should be instantiated. Scholars and advocates argue that, at a minimum, the right to equal representation implies a constitutional mandate that state legislative districts be apportioned based on total population, rather than Citizen Voting Age Population or any other less inclusive measure. But leading arguments for that position, based on the Equal Protection Clause and the mechanism of \"virtual representation,\" are seriously incomplete. This article argues that the Petition Clause of the First Amendment should play a central role in these debates over the institutional design of representative democracy. Specifically, the Petition Clause and the practice of petitioning that it protects provide the link between universal representation and state legislative apportionment. The Petition Clause implies a right of equal access to one's representative, and this in turn requires that legislative districts contain equal numbers of people - voters and non-voters alike.

Since the 2004 presidential campaign, when the Bush presidential advance team prevented anyone who seemed unsympathetic to their candidate from attending his ostensibly public appearances, it has become commonplace for law enforcement officers and political event sponsors to classify ordinary expressions of dissent as security threats and to try to keep officeholders as far removed from possible protest as they can. Thus without formally limiting free speech the government places arbitrary restrictions on how, when, and where such speech may occur.

For over seventy-five years Edward S. Corwin's text has been a basic reference in the study of U.S. Constitutional Law. The 14th edition, the first new edition since 1973, brings the volume up to date through 1977. In this classic work, historian Edward Corwin presented the text of the U.S. Constitution along with his own commentary on its articles, sections, clauses, and amendments. Corwin was a renowned authority on constitutional law and jurisprudence, and was hired at Princeton University by Woodrow Wilson in 1905. Far from being an impersonal textbook, Corwin's edition was full of opinion. Not afraid to express his own strong views of the development of American law, Corwin offered piquant descriptions of the debates about the meaning of clauses, placing recent decisions of the court \"in the familiar setting of his own views.\" The favor of his style is evident in his comments on judicial review (\"American democracy's way of covering its bet\") and the cabinet (\"an administrative anachronism\" that should be replaced by a legislative council \"whose daily salt does not come from the Presidential table\"). Corwin periodically revised the book for nearly forty years, incorporating into each new edition his views of new Supreme Court rulings and other changes in American law. Although Corwin intended his book for the general public, his interpretations always gained the attention of legal scholars and practitioners. The prefaces he wrote to the revised editions were often controversial for the views he offered on the latest developments of constitutional law, and the book only grew in stature and recognition. After his death in 1963, other scholars prepared subsequent editions, fourteen in all.

Wilton demonstrates that by the 1830s the political energies of Upper Canadians were far more likely to be channelled through petitioning movements than election campaigns. Petitioning movements, which were connected not only with public meetings but with demonstrations and parades, were also increasingly associated with political violence. The resulting assaults, riots, and effigy-burnings - prominent features of Tory governance - not only contributed to the striking political polarization of the population but also helped provoke the Rebellion of 1837.