Protests dominate the news. But what is the freedom of assembly? What the First Amendment calls “the right of the people peaceably to assemble”? Legal scholar John Inazu (Washington University, St. Louis) joins Evan Rosa for a discussion of the freedom of assembly—its history, meaning, interpretation, and application—as well as how it impacts the ability for citizens to gather to demonstrate and protest.
Protests dominate the news. And while we’re familiar with freedom of speech, free exercise of religion, and freedom of the press—what about the freedom of assembly? The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution—also contains “the right of the people peaceably to assemble.”
But what exactly does that secure? How does this foundational, but often forgotten, right impact the shape of democracy, undergirding and making possible a flourishing public life? And are we prepared to defend the full application of these rights to our political rivals? Those we disagree with?
Legal scholar John Inazu (Washington University, St. Louis) joins Evan Rosa for a discussion of the freedom of assembly—its history, meaning, interpretation, and application—as well as how it impacts the ability for citizens to gather to demonstrate and protest.
Show Notes
About John Inazu
John Inazu is the Sally D. Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law and Religion at Washington University in St. Louis. He teaches criminal law, law and religion, and various First Amendment courses. He writes and speaks frequently about pluralism, assembly, free speech, religious freedom, and other issues. John has written three books—including Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect (Zondervan, 2024) and Liberty’s Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly (Yale, 2012)—and has published opinion pieces in the Washington Post, Atlantic, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, USA Today, Newsweek, and CNN. He is also the founder of the Carver Project and the Legal Vocation Fellowship and is a senior fellow with Interfaith America.
Image Citation
Original caption: “Demonstrators sit, with their feet in the Reflecting Pool, during the March on Washington, 1963] / WKL."
Original black and white negative by Warren K. Leffler. Taken August 28th, 1963, Washington D.C, United States (@libraryofcongress).
Colorized by Jordan J. Lloyd.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA https://www.loc.gov/item/2011648314/
Production Notes
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith. yale. edu.
John Inazu: Especially at the national level, it's very hard to name what the common good is, given how much we diverge about. Serious questions like what is a human being or what is human flourishing or what's the purpose of the country? Without being able to name those questions it becomes hard to name the common good.
So in some ways as a second best solution because we need to have something that brings the weed together and it can't just be Pursue your own truth. Maybe as part of the second best solution, we have a kind of agreement to procedural protections that, that recognizes the importance of groups for everyone, for us and for the people who are in some ways against us politically at least, and honors those protections across the board.
And this shared commitment to civil liberties, which might be part of a shared commitment to the democratic experiment is part of what gives us the collective we in the absence of being able to name and agree upon the common good, or another way to put this is that we can find important common ground even when we disagree about the common good.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Can you recite the First Amendment of the Constitution? It's this, Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion. Are prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances?
For citizens of America, do we know what these clauses, taken together, secure for us? How the individual clauses themselves impact the shape of democracy? How they undergird and make possible a flourishing public life? And are we prepared to defend the full application of these rights to our political rivals?
Those we vehemently disagree with, we're honing in today on a particular clause that is particularly relevant at the moment. The right of the people peaceably to assemble, also known as freedom of assembly. It's an overlooked, even forgotten clause. But as my guest today points out, it's the only inherently relational clause of the First Amendment.
Sort of like a wherever two or more gathered kind of thing. John Inazu is a law professor and political theorist. He's the Sally D. Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law and Religion at Washington University in St. Louis, and is author most recently of Learning to Disagree, the Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect.
But it's actually the topic of his first book that we're discussing today. He wrote Liberty's Refuge, the Forgotten Freedom of Assembly in 2012, because he found a significant gap in recent legal and popular thinking about this clause of the first amendment. I appreciate it. And you can down a free PDF copy of that book in today's show notes, but as is evidenced by the difficult questions surrounding the right to gather, demonstrate, protest, and convene to form a more perfect union.
It's a clause we shouldn't forget. Thanks for listening today, friends.
John Inazu, thank you so much for joining me on For the Life of the World. Evan, great to be with you. So these days, your interests in constitutional law are showing themselves as significant in pretty important ways. As we look at the recent headlines around, around protests, particularly on college campuses, it seems like there's this important resurgence of the question of the meaning of peaceable assembly.
But you've been talking about peaceable assembly as title of your book says is Liberty's Refuge for a long time. And so I was just hoping to start with a little bit about what drew you to the question of freedom of assembly.
John Inazu: Yeah. So I, you know, this was actually kind of a contingent moment for me. I was working for a federal judge and working on a first amendment case, looked down at the text of the first amendment and saw the right of the people peaceably to assemble.
And I thought to myself, I've had three years of law school and four years of legal practice and I've never thought about the assembly clause. And it occurred to me that that was strange and maybe interesting. And after a little bit of research, realized nobody had written about the assembly clause in 40 years.
The US Supreme Court hadn't decided the case on assembly in 30 or 35 years. And I was about to go to grad school. So this became, as you might imagine, a really good grad school dissertation topic. And so from the start, I was intrigued by this kind of almost obscure, but also very core and central right to our civil liberties.
I will say that out of the gates, as soon as I saw the word assembly, I immediately thought of Ecclesia and then the New Testament church as this different kind of counterpolitical entity and what that meant. So along the way, I've also done some theological work around the idea of assembly. But the core, my core expertise is as a lawyer and a constitutional scholar, so primarily centered there.
And then all of the different things, normatively, historically, theoretically, that flow out of this important rite of assembly.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, it's worth framing the significance of what it is to assemble, what it is to gather, what it is to be with each other as a community, as a kind of more than a mere American value, but as a human value and as something that's really deeply knit into human nature.
John Inazu: That's right. And I think one of the, to me, one of the powerful normative points out of the assembly clause in the first amendment is recognizing that it's the only one of the five individual rights that requires. more than one person to be exercised. So the other writes, speak, I can speak alone. I can go online and be depressed by myself.
I can petition the government alone. And at least some days I can practice religion on my own, but I can't assemble alone. There's something that requires at least one other person with assembly. And so part of my argument out of the gates was this is embedded into our constitutional framework, but also precisely for the reasons you just said, this is part of human nature that we actually live and exist.
in societies as parts of groups, and that's how we do a lot of our important belief and identity formation. And it leads to all kinds of challenges. Madison called them factions were not a good thing. They are a political problem and a political reality that has to be addressed in some way, but they're also a fact of the world and way predating our own society and our own constitutional norms.
People have gathered as assemblies and groups for a long, long time.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. So, What I want to do with you today is seek to understand the Assembly Clause and try to frame it in such a way that we can appreciate its meaning, but also appreciate its disappearance and why it has disappeared and the problem that might pose.
And to do that, I'm hoping that you can give us a little bit of First Amendment history kind of 101. Would that all Americans knew the Constitution. And we're legal scholars and could name each individual clause of the first assembly. But as you point out, the fact is most people can't even name it. And that immediately reminded me of the Clash song.
know your rights from combat rock.
And they don't list the freedom of assembly either. I'm hoping you can give us a little bit of one on one. Like these clauses are so essential to America's founding, but they all present their own challenges in, in remembering them, let alone interpreting and applying
John Inazu: rights. Right. Yeah. So, I think we're gonna have to probably be closer to the 201 course than the 101 course, just to even get on the gates here.
Maybe I'll make three historical points about why the right of assembly is so obscure and so forgotten. The first is almost a textual point, but the wording of the First Amendment is the right of the people peaceably to assemble, comma, and to petition the government for our address of grievances. Maybe And the wording, I mean, if you were to actually look at the text and try to read it grammatically, it doesn't make sense.
Somebody, as the framers were cobbling together the various clauses that became the first amendment, somebody made a grammatical oversight in putting them together. And that led to some understandable confusion. So if you look carefully, the singular noun, right, preceding assembly, What that creates is a question about how petition relates to assembly and the comma after assembly further exacerbates that challenge.
Yeah, it's really interesting. And, and, uh, there's no grammatically easy way to solve it. It's just an interpretive question. The early evidence from the founding is pretty clear that assembly and petition were two distinct rights. They had two different purposes. But this becomes conflated at the end of the 19th century when the U.
S. Supreme Court of all places just misinterprets the text. So they've got a case that raises the First Amendment, they quote the First Amendment, and then the Supreme Court of the United States says That assembly is limited to purposes of petitioning the government. It's one right. It's actually one narrow right only for the purposes of petition.
That's a pretty extraordinary move when you think about how we might consider assembly today. And it's a move that then is followed in decades of legal scholarship and court opinions. And for a long, for really the early part of the 20th century, courts and scholars and commentators follow the Supreme Court and assume that it's a very narrowly limited right.
That becomes even more interesting when you think about what is happening at the beginning of the 20th century when you have. You know, the rise of labor activism when you have some of the communist kinds of cases arising and people are starting to recognize assembly as a right, but they're still constrained by the court's interpretation.
So historical move number one is there's this just wrong textual interpretation of the First Amendment by the Supreme Court that doesn't get noticed or corrected. For a long time.
Evan Rosa: So it sounds to me, tell me if this is, if I'm getting to the thrust of why this is so important, that if the right of the people peaceably to assemble is limited to only cases where you're formally petitioning the government for a redress of grievances, then all sorts of peaceable assembly, protesting or gathering to discuss certain things that might be considered unneeded.
Like out of bounds by certain people in power, they're gonna have the right to shut those down in a way. Is this Well,
John Inazu: I, uh, maybe just to tweak that a bit, there would be no express constitutional prohibition against action taken
Evan Rosa: Oh, right. Against those. So then there would be no redress for those gathering, those assembling.
John Inazu: Yeah. I mean, on, on that reading, you would just say there is no right. A peaceable assembly for anything other than petitioning the government.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, you can see that. So then what's number two?
John Inazu: So number two is in the middle of the 20th century. There are a series of cases that go to the U. S. Supreme Court, and they argue for a right of association, meaning you can think about what does it mean to associate for like minded groups together and then have some privacy in what they're doing and maybe exclude others as well.
The challenge is there is no right of association in the First Amendment or anywhere in the Constitution. So in 1958, the Supreme Court announces a new non textual right of association. The legal and jurisprudential moves here are actually precursors to what becomes the right of privacy that drives them, you know, a lot of the well known abortion cases and others.
But the first move to these non textual penumbral rights comes in the context of association. And the court says somewhere in the amalgam of the First Amendment, there is a right of association. Now, in my own work, I've long argued there is, and it's called the right of assembly. Okay. And assembly is capacious enough to include everything that you want from association.
And it has the added value of being there from the start and having a history attached to it. What the Supreme Court does in acknowledging or recognizing a new right of association is it inserts a concept without a history. So then we're suddenly left to figure out, well, what does this mean? Nobody knows.
I mean, there are references to Tocqueville and other political theorists that certainly talked about associational rights, but they weren't constitutional rights. They were, you know, either natural rights or ideas of political theory, not embedded in the law. And now suddenly like the Supreme Court and other courts have to figure out what it means.
And this becomes massively complicated because in the decade following the initial recognition of the right of association, there are two groups. that bring claims of associational protections to the U. S. Supreme Court. One is the Communist Party. The other is the NAACP. And so you can imagine how those cases go.
And in a very results oriented way, the Supreme Court protects the NAACP in every case, and it denies protections to the Communist Party of the United States in every case. And You know, you and I can look back on that and say, well, those are good outcomes normatively, but they're weird outcomes doctrinally.
It can't be the case that the same right is subject to, you know, the groups we like, but not necessarily the groups we don't like. And so this creates a lot of doctrinal confusion about what is the, what does this right mean? What are its limits? How is it applied? That's never been fully addressed by the Supreme Court.
So now in addition to forgetting and minimizing assembly, you throw in this new extra textual right of association that's under theorized and under thought.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
John Inazu: Yeah. So that last historical point, and again, like we're doing the 201 course is that for various reasons, and it gets a little complicated, but under First Amendment law, as courts start to evaluate physical gatherings like protests and the limits of protests.
So we're now away from the group itself, the association, but the protest in the street and where are the limits. to the protest, I would say that also intuitively and naturally falls under the assembly clause. But what courts have done is moved that analysis under the free speech clause. So in something called time, place, and manner restrictions under public forum analysis, which is entirely a free speech analysis, courts now resolve protests and other parades, marches, and demonstrations with that free speech lens.
That does a couple of things. One, you know, once again, assembly is neglected and ignored. But second, and maybe more substantively, I don't think speech can do all the work that assembly might otherwise do when you think about the different dynamics of an embodied protest, where it's not just the message expressed in words or even signs, but it's also symbolic expression.
You know, sometimes people will dress a certain way or they'll move a certain way, or they'll be silent, or they'll stand in a particular place or not in a particular place. And all of those dimensions for solidarity or for a kind of movement expression can be neglected in a, I would say, a more straightforward or simplified public forum analysis under the free speech clause.
And so now we've got, just to recap the three historical points, we've got an assembly clause that is, unexamined or unconsidered, a new right of association that is under theorized, and a free speech right that's doing too much work. And all of that gets thrown together when you have a protest situation.
And I've actually done a little more recent work on what's happened in the last decade, say, when someone brings an assembly claim in a federal court. And more often than not, when courts address them, they'll go through a long history similar to the one that I've laid out and then say, well, but there's no law here.
So we're going to have to go to the right of association or the free speech clause to resolve this case. That's a very strange way to be doing law, especially constitutional law, especially around a right that isn't the text of the first amendment.
Evan Rosa: I think this last point is one to just follow up on a little bit.
The fact that, that we're conflating free speech clause and the peaceable assembly clause seems to make sense. Especially in the context of protests, wherein what you say there. seems to be so significant. So I'm hoping just for a little bit additional clarity on where that rub really is. Why do we need to limit the free speech clause in order to create more space for peaceable assembly?
Like, and you're thinking, what is so essential about retaining that? I know you've given a shot just now, but can you say a little bit more about that?
John Inazu: Yeah. I mean, so maybe a couple of things come to mind. One is in asking courts to take seriously the assembly claim, we're asking them to do an analysis of what the assembly clause is and how it came to be and what it means today.
So this is sort of how precedent works anyway. When you have only a free speech framework, you're looking at other free speech cases and analogs to develop your doctrine. And when there's nothing that's been done with assembly, you're going to, you're going to lose the granularity or context for the physical gathering.
And with that, even when you think about something like imminent threat of law breaking, you That's going to, that's the free speech standard that might look quite different when you're talking about a group of people rather than a single individual. It could matter where that happens or time of day and not all of these things come out easily in pure free speech doctrine.
But I think there's a more substantive point too, which is we ought to care about the values that drive different parts of the constitution. So in free speech law, for example, we think sometimes about, well, the importance of self expression or the marketplace of ideas or the ability to challenge certain viewpoints.
All of those are good. To disagree, sure. Yeah. All of those are good, but there might be a different set of values underlying the assembly clause, the groupness, the idea of collective expression, maybe a more powerful vision of dissent or counter liturgical practices that are very hard to understand through an individualized self, but easier to grasp when you think about a group of people doing something together.
So I think that both for the doctrinal, constitutional reasons, and also the theoretical reasons, it's important to pay attention to both.
Evan Rosa: I mean, really, to me, what's jumping out is just the communal nature. It comes back to that place where we started, that it's the only clause in the first amendment that does look inherently communal and relational, and it matters at the level of a group.
And the gathering itself, carving out enough space for that is important. And I wanted to draw out the peaceable side of that phrase, right? Like it's an important qualifier, peaceable assembly. A really fascinating aspect of this particular clause, besides the groupish nature of it, is the peaceable aspect.
So that, that very important qualifier in the clause, peaceable assembly, it raises for me right away the idea of violent assembly, which just sounds like a battle, like a mob, like a kind of angry revolution. And you might think, well, this is that kind of thing that gives us some space. to, to gather as a, as an alternative to that kind of violence.
And we need that alternative to violence.
John Inazu: Yes. And the line between peaceable and non peaceful is going to be very hard to discern sometimes. I think that we're
Evan Rosa: faced with that even in this very moment, as Students are being arrested down the street from me.
John Inazu: Right. No, I think that's right. And then we certainly have case studies happening in the news today that illustrate the point, but I would say part of assembly and because it's not sort of the right peaceably to stand still and do nothing, right?
It is the right of assembly, which almost conveys at least the possibility of action and movement and dynamism. And with that comes a degree of instability. So if you're, you know, for people who are concerned about. the alternative where things just break out into total chaos, the way to guard against that is often to have some breathing space, which means allowing for some instability and some uncertainty.
So when I think about law enforcement managing protests and assemblies, I think the best law enforcement will understand there has to be some breathing space. You know, you're not gonna, as soon as a person steps across the line onto private property, that's not when you make the arrest. You allow, you know, you allow some things to happen, but you don't allow them to go too far.
And that's more art than science, but it does matter. Sometimes it's actually more specified. And when you look at sort of what a particular criminal statute is, some of them will say five or more people gathered in order to be an unlawful assembly. Well, that means if four people are doing stupid stuff, it's not an unlawful assembly by decree of the legislature.
So you have to have law enforcement really aware of what the local circumstances are And then kind of attuned to the reality of Instability and a little bit of dissonance, you know, especially when protests grow large, when they go on into the evening, all the dimensions where you would understandably start to get more concerned when they get rowdier, they still might be peaceable.
And then you have to use this judgment about when it becomes non peaceable, but that line really matters. And then on the protest side, you know, I think you mentioned a minute ago, revolution on the protest side, you want to be pretty clear about what your objectives are and what you're doing. I once heard Cornel West talk about the difference between reform mode and revolution mode.
And, you know, when you're in a reform mode, you can still protest, but you want to have a plan. And when you're in revolution mode, you're no longer interested in sustaining the institution and at a socio political level. You better be sure that you're going to win at that point or the consequences are going to be pretty dire.
Evan Rosa: Indeed. Yeah. Um, because I think there's this question about when to step in, when to dismantle an assembly, when to dismantle a protest is currently very important at this moment as people are protesting, in this case, the Israel Palestine war. And I'm wondering if you can back up that it doesn't have to be about this particular engagement, but help us understand assembly versus protest, because I think most people are going to be connecting with this through the concept of protest.
John Inazu: Yeah. I mean, so in my view, assembly is the larger category of which protest is a part and assemblies can also be prayer meetings, or dinner clubs, or sewing groups, or fraternities or churches. So there are all kinds of ways you can manifest an assembly. And the important through line is this is a group usually, but not always with kind of an understood purpose and people are coming together for a reason.
So there are lots of assemblies that don't manifest as protests, but some do. And then I think back to the earlier point about when you do protests, sort of what's the goal and what's the objective? I mean, some of the current protests we're seeing on college campus around the Middle East are, I'm not, it's not clear to me what the end game is or what the objective of the protest is, especially within particular educational settings.
And without an end game and without an awareness of the institution that you're actually protesting, it becomes very difficult to stay on message or even convey what your message is. I mean, in some ways, I've been thinking the last few days about the contrast to the civil rights movement and those protests, which were very.
organized, and very strategic, and very disciplined. And that all mattered to their long term success. And they weren't just protesting for the sake of protest. I mean, I don't doubt the moral convictions of people protesting today, but it's not clear to me that they have a strategy or a discipline, some of which will take inevitable coalition building to achieve any of the objectives that they want.
Evan Rosa: Would you say a little bit about the connection between the right to assemble peaceably and then policing that assembly? Where do those lines draw you? You brought up a while back, you know, it's more an art than a science at times, and you know, there's a lot of questions around, I think, I mean, really it, it draws to mind right now the need for constitutionality to be present in policing in an important way to know the.
attuned to that at the level of policing. Josh
John Inazu: Birkeley Right. Yeah, I think on two levels, this becomes important. One is just law enforcement and the people supervising law enforcement have to know what the law is. And one of the really striking things I've realized in many of these protest situations is there's just a vague sense of, something called unlawful assembly without attention to what the law actually is.
And in every jurisdiction that criminalizes this particular act, at least in the United States, there will be something that tells you what has to happen in order for an assembly to be unlawful. And it can't just be your individual judgment that the assembly has become non peaceable. You have to do a kind of assessment.
Some of it's empirical, how many people are in the area, some of it's subjective, what's their sense of a threat, some of it's. intuitive about whether there's an agreement to conspire toward criminal activity. All of that matters. And as someone tasked with enforcing the law, you can't shortcut any of that.
So that's sort of just on understanding the law. But then I think there's kind of a tactical and a training issue too, which is we need to invest in the people and the resources in law enforcement who can do this well. And my friend, David French sometimes compares what we're seeing locally to The ability of our U.
S. military to do this all the time in overseas situations where in many cases, the threat is far worse and far, far greater, where there can be a sniper across the way, or, you know, the sense of who is armed and how could be far more dire than many local protest situations. And yeah, we train our military to engage with civilian populations in certain ways and certain tactics that allow for that breathing space.
And I think we should want to see more of that in local law enforcement. It doesn't mean you have to take absurd risks for yourself or for the people around you, but it does mean better training and better ability to execute in that training.
Evan Rosa: Absolutely. You've said recently that there's this important connection between peaceable assembly and the concept of collective belonging.
And this was really appealing to me that We need to create the freedom and then exercise that freedom on a regular basis in order to, to maintain this collective sense of we, and the idea that it might just be only us rather than us and them. And, and by doing, by protecting the right to peaceably assemble and by educating around it and by drawing more awareness.
to it that we might be supporting that. I wonder if you share a little bit about what that means for you, the collective belonging.
John Inazu: Yeah. I mean, you know, part of this as a suspicion I have about the language of the common good when it is deployed and across a pluralistic society, when actually, especially at a national level, it's very hard to name what the common good is, given how much we diverge about Serious questions like what is a human being, or what is human flourishing, or what's the purpose of the country without being able to name those questions, it becomes hard to name the common good.
So in some ways. As a second best solution, because we need to have something that brings the weed together, and it can't just be a. Pursue your own truth. So maybe as part of the second best solution, we have a kind of agreement to procedural protections that recognizes the importance of groups for everyone, for us and for the people who are in some ways against us politically, at least, and honors those protections across the board.
Religion operates the same way, that you should have the free exercise of religion for your own faith, but also everybody else who wants to pursue it. their own faith traditions, even when they're opposed to your own. And this shared commitment to civil liberties, which might be a part of a shared commitment to the democratic experiment, is part of what gives us the collective we in the absence of being able to name and agree upon the common good.
Or another way to put this is that we can find important common ground, even when we disagree about the common good.
Evan Rosa: As you think through your really close and careful reading of that clause and the history of its interpretation of peaceable assembly, I wonder if there's additional goods or if you might provide a kind of picture, what it's made possible in America.
John Inazu: Yeah. I mean, you know, I sometimes say that civil liberties are for losers. And by that, I mean, you don't need the protections of civil liberties if you're the majority, because you either write the laws or write in. favorable exemptions that benefit you. When you're in the political minority of whatever stripe, that's when you need to be able to argue for difference and for change and for an alternative way of life.
And in some ways, the history of the right of assembly in this country is the history of people who, uh, argued from the political margins for a different way of life. And the history of women's suffrage, the history of African Americans in this country, the history of the labor movement, often sort of widespread.
And you think about strikes and boycotts and the importance of collective action when the people in power are not going to listen to a single individual, but sometimes listen more when it is a group of people acting together, religious minority communities of all kinds. And then today, what's very interesting about the empirical reality of that right is that because we are now so pluralistic and diverse, but that diversity is actually quite regional, it means that you may need the protections of assembly and around your group very differently if you're living in one part of country than if you are in another.
That to be, say, the conservative Christian group in San Francisco is quite different than being that same group in Birmingham, Alabama. And conversely, to be the progressive gay advocacy group in Birmingham looks different than in San Francisco. And this is, I think, a real opportunity for Americans of all different persuasions to recognize why even today, this shared commitment to the right really matters.
And then we can all point to a whole bunch of historical examples where this has really happened and we can see the actual intangible benefits of protecting that rights.
Evan Rosa: Practically speaking. What can the average American citizen do to uphold the civil liberty of peaceful assembly? What can we do to both honor it and maintain its effectiveness in our democracy?
John Inazu: Yeah, I mean, a couple of things. One would be exercise the right, you know, don't, don't be afraid to be part of something that you care about, whether it's a group or a protest or another effort and, and to be, take seriously the responsibility of having the right where it is denied even today in lots of parts of the world.
But I think a related point is to argue robustly. on the importance of these rights for everyone. I think, you know, the average person is not going to be writing the laws or deciding the cases, but the average person does contribute to the public discourse over the needs for civil liberties, or in the other direction, those who are basically making special pleadings that civil liberties should only apply to them and not other people.
And that, you know, that raises money and puts fear in people's hearts, but that's not the American way. And it's really not a coherent way to understand civil liberties. So I would say, jump into the conversation, make sure that you're arguing for the importance of civil liberties for everyone.
Evan Rosa: That's fantastic. John, I can't thank you enough for, for gathering with me here today.
John Inazu: Assembly. Yes.
Evan Rosa: Uh, and assembling with me and guiding us through this really essential and sadly forgotten pause for the first moment.
John Inazu: So so much for joining. Thanks. For
Evan Rosa: the life of the world is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured legal scholar, John Inazu, production assistants by Macy Bridge, Alexa Rollo, and Tim Berglund. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.
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