ATL
I had to make sure this wasn’t an Onion article when I read about it.
It is easy to laud the importance of our Constitution when there is no crisis. Constitutional advocacy really matters when our foundational values are in tension with state interest and polarizing effect. While I had to try my damnedest to stay awake during the dormant commerce clause lectures 1L year, I didn’t have that problem with the protest modules because it centered on what we could and couldn’t take for granted during times of unrest. Given our country’s history, that’s about 92% of the time. And while Supreme Court cases can make for a go-to litmus test of what flies at a given point in our history, most of what is actually happening on the ground never makes it that far. That said, this small case coming out of D.C. could be some history in the making. Axios has coverage:
The American Civil Liberties Union filed the suit on behalf of Sam O’Hara against four Metropolitan Police Department officers and a member of the Ohio National Guard seeking damages for alleged First and Fourth Amendment violations, false arrest/imprisonment; battery.
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[An] Ohio guardsman “was not amused by this satire” and “threatened to call D.C. police officers to ‘handle’ the protester if he persisted” when the incident took place on Sept. 11, the ACLU attorneys allege in their complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court of Colombia.
