Liberty's Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly

Abstract

This is the introductory chapter from my book, Liberty's Refuge. From the publisher: "This original and provocative book looks at an important constitutional freedom that today is largely forgotten: the right of assembly. While this right lay at the heart of some of the most important social movements in American history — abolitionism, women’s suffrage, the labor and civil rights movements — courts now prefer to speak about the freedoms of association and speech. But the right of “expressive association” undermines protections for groups whose purposes are demonstrable not by speech or expression but through ways of being. John D. Inazu demonstrates that the forgetting of assembly and the embrace of association lose sight of important dimensions of our constitutional tradition."