Law Commons^™

The Forgotten Freedom Of Assembly, John D. Inazu

Faculty Scholarship

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 First World War and the second Red Scare of 1950s McCarthyism. Abraham Lincoln once called 'the right of the people peaceably to assemble' part of 'the Constitutional substitute for revolution'. In 1939, the …

The Unsettling ‘Well-Settled’ Law Of Freedom Of Association, John D. Inazu

Faculty Scholarship

This article brings historical, theoretical, and doctrinal critiques to bear upon the current framework for the constitutional right of association. It argues that the Supreme Court’s categories of expressive and intimate association first announced in the 1984 decision, Roberts v. United States Jaycees, are neither well-settled nor defensible. Intimate association and expressive association are indefensible categories, but they matter deeply. They matter to the Jaycees. They matter to the Chi Iota Colony of the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity, a now defunct Jewish social group at the College of Staten Island that had sought to limit its membership to men. They …

The Strange Origins Of The Constitutional Right Of Association, John D. Inazu

Faculty Scholarship

Although much has been written about the freedom of association and its ongoing importance to American constitutionalism, much recent scholarship mistakenly relies on a truncated history that begins with Roberts v. United States Jaycees, 468 U.S. 609 (1984), the case that divided constitutional association into intimate and expressive components. Roberts’s doctrinal framework has been rightly criticized. However, neither the right of association nor all of its doctrinal problems start there. The Supreme Court’s foray into the constitutional right of association began a generation earlier with NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson, 357 U.S. 449 (1958). This article offers a new …

Schrödinger’S Cross: The Quantum Mechanics Of The Establishment Clause, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Scholarship

Perhaps the most famous character in modern physics is Schrödinger’s Cat, an unfortunate feline trapped in a box alongside a flask containing deadly poison that may or may not have been released. Thanks to the wonders of quantum mechanics, the cat is both alive and dead — “mixed or smeared out in equal parts” — until the box is opened, at which point the act of observation causes its state to collapse into either life or death.

Far away in the Mojave Desert, the “life” of a six-foot-tall cross is disputed: it is either a religious symbol or it is …