No One Has a Right to Protest in My Home
Last edited Mon Apr 29, 2024, 05:26 PM - Edit history (1)
A couple of weeks ago, some law students disrupted a dinner at the private home of UC Berkely Dean and his wife. See
Link to tweet
This Dean was on MSNBC with Katy Tur and so I had to look up the article that this Dean published. Here is a great article by Dean Erwin Chemerinsky on the First Amendment.
Link to tweet
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/campus-protest-first-amendment-berkeley/678186/
On April 9, about 60 students came to our home for dinner. Our guests were seated at tables in our backyard. Just as they began eating, I was stunned to see the leader of Law Students for Justice in Palestinewho was among the registered guestsstand up with a microphone that she had brought, go up the steps in the yard, and begin reading a speech about the plight of the Palestinians. My wife and I immediately approached her and asked her to stop speaking and leave the premises. The protester continued. At one point, my wife attempted to take away her microphone. Repeatedly, we said to her: You are a guest in our home. Please leave.
The student insisted that she had free-speech rights. But our home is not a forum for free speech; it is our own property, and the First Amendmentwhich constrains the governments power to encroach on speech on public propertydoes not apply at all to guests in private backyards. The dinner, which was meant to celebrate graduating students, was obviously disrupted. Even if we had held the dinner in the law-school building, no one would have had a constitutional right to disrupt the event. I have taught First Amendment law for 44 years, and as many other experts have confirmed, this is not a close question.....
Being at the center of a social-media firestorm was strange and unsettling. We received thousands of messages, many very hateful and some threatening. For days, we got death threats. An organized email campaign demanded that the regents and campus officials fire my wife and me, and another organized email campaign supported us. Amid an intensely painful sequence of events, we experienced one upside: After receiving countless supportive messages from people we have met over the course of decades, we felt like Jimmy Stewart at the end of Its a Wonderful Life.
Overall, though, this experience has been enormously sad. It made me realize how anti-Semitism is not taken as seriously as other kinds of prejudice. If a student group had put up posters that included a racist caricature of a Black dean or played on hateful tropes about Asian American or LGBTQ people, the school would have eruptedand understandably so. But a plainly anti-Semitic poster received just a handful of complaints from Jewish staff and students.
Many peoples reaction to the incident in our yard reflected their views of what is happening in the Middle East. But it should not be that way. The dinners at our house were entirely nonpolitical; there was no program of any kind. And our university communities, along with society as a whole, will be worse off if every social interactionincluding ones at peoples private homesbecomes a forum for uninvited political monologues.
The First Amendment does not allow one to stage a demonstration at the private home of a law School Dean. If this law student does graduate, she may find a hard time finding a job at a major law firm.
msongs
(69,768 posts)The Mouth
(3,261 posts)A person's right to toss someone off of their property by any means and with any amount of force should be limited only by a valid lease or a police warrant.
Voltaire2
(14,586 posts)Seems pretty dubious to me. Self defense should be limited to lethal threats.
Hekate
(94,001 posts)The Mouth
(3,261 posts)My property. End of subject. If I tell you to get off, get off.
If someone doesn't get the hell of your property when you tell them to? Anything is justified, just as if you caught them stealing.
Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin
(113,764 posts)usonian
(12,929 posts)Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or 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.
Hekate
(94,001 posts)Prof. Chemerinsky has taught First Amendment Law for 40 years. Possibly you could look up some of his exegesis on the difference between public and private spaces.
LetMyPeopleVote
(153,207 posts)This law school dean is NOT a state actor and is not subject to the First Amendment
How did this idiot law student pass Constitutional Law?
bucolic_frolic
(46,271 posts)and sometimes with local LE. But the right to the sanctity of your own home is pretty sacred. You could likely toss anyone out by the scruff of their neck anywhere. And in this society it's a good bet to feel threatened with bodily harm when someone violates the boundaries of your private property.
BaronChocula
(2,378 posts)They did the first thing that popped into their heads. Antics like this don't really move the needle. And there was no reason to protest Chermerinsky as far as I can tell. Some people are more about kitchen sink approaches rather than strategy. Too bad.
Igel
(35,956 posts)She was most likely 25.
Truly, an immature child. I guess?
An immature, youthfully impulsive person who's about to take the bar and become an attorney.
BaronChocula
(2,378 posts)I still chalked it up to a youthful lack of emotional control. Hell, I have siblings in their 50s and 60s who still demonstrate impulsive behavior. I don't get it. A little discipline and meditation isn't that hard.