The James Hoffman Family Endowed Speaker Series Annual Lecture with Professor Tabatha Abu El-Haj
About this Event
1311 Miller Dr, Coral Gables, FL 33146
Dean Patricia Abril and the University of Miami School of Law along with the University of Miami School of Communications invites you to the James Hoffman Family Endowed Speaker Series Annual Lecture with Tabatha Abu El-Haj, Professor of Law, Thomas R. Kline School of Law, Drexel University.
"Protest in the Absence of a Right of Assembly"
We live in an age of protest. Social, political, and technological conditions—from economic inequality and partisan polarization to the development of social media and a deadly pandemic—have converged in the past two decades to afford new salience to public assembly as a central tactic of politics in the United States. Yet, despite the First Amendment’s explicit guarantee, those who gather in the United States are functionally left without a constitutional right to assemble. The Assembly Clause has no independent significance in contemporary First Amendment doctrine. The Supreme Court has not decided an important public protest case in decades. And despite multiple forceable dispersals and thousands of arrests of nonviolent protesters, no Occupy or Black Lives Matter (BLM) activist has won a case on the grounds that their right to peaceably assemble had been infringed. Instead, around the country, including here in Florida, there has been a move to increase regulation, including through criminal sanctions, of protesters. This talk will address the scope of the right to protest and its constitutional foundations in the United States. More specifically, it will explain how the functional absence of the Assembly Clause in First Amendment law and constitutional discourse fundamentally distorts our analysis of the proper scope of constitutional protection for political assemblies and explain what we see.
