Ristuccia on "Dangerous to the Liberties of a Free People": Secret Societies and the Right to Assemble

Nathan Ristuccia, Institute for Free Speech, is publishing 'Dangerous to the Liberties of a Free People': Secret Societies and the Right to Assemble in volume 4 of the Journal of Free Speech Law. Here is the abstract.

Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries often feared that secret assembly threatened republican government. Oath-bound secret societies were allegedly elitist cabals that would establish an imperium in imperio oppressive to ordinary citizens. Yet despite this hostility, many early Americans also insisted that freedom of assembly included the right to gather anonymously. According to this view, laws could not prohibit or excessively burden secrecy. This article, therefore, examines the discourse around secret societies both at America’s founding and at the time the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified. It demonstrates that—although there were voices on both sides of the debate—the weight of the evidence indicates that the First Amendment’s Assembly Clause originally protected the right to assemble in secret.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.