Nearly two weeks after people protesting a police shooting set up an encampment in an intersection on the east side of Madison, the city broke it up — UW-Madison political science professor emeritus Howard Schweber speaks to First Amendment rights and their limits.

Howard Schweber
Professor emeritus, UW-Madison Department of Political Science

• Madison police and city employees cleared out a protest encampment on Aug. 4 that occupied the intersection where Corey Ruiz was shot and killed by an officer on July 22. City officials said they had waited long enough to clear the encampment, and that local businesses and residents had a right to see the street return to normal. Protesters accused the police of using excessive force. Schweber said while the First Amendment protects the rights to assembly and speech, blocking the rights of others is not protected.
• Schweber: “You have a right to protest up to the point where you’re disrupting other people’s ability to go about their day. It’s a simplistic version, of course, but it’s not far off. If you block streets, if you block sidewalks, if you block access to businesses, if you block people’s abilities to get in and out of their home, if you disrupt the operation of classrooms, for example, none of those is protected by the First Amendment. The First Amendment protects the right to express yourself in ways that are peaceful and discursive. There simply is no protection for engaging in, well, civil disobedience. And the reason we call it civil disobedience is that when you do that, when you deliberately march into a racially segregated lunch counter and integrate it, right, you acknowledge you risk being arrested and suffering the punishment. That’s part of the whole civil disobedient paradigm. It’s an honorable, it can be a very honorable thing, but there is not a First Amendment right to engage in acts that would otherwise be crimes.’

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