Opinion ID: 848785
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Text of the Petition Clause

Text: As a textual matter, I note that although the United States Supreme Court has stated that all the First Amendment rights are cut from the same cloth, McDonald v. Smith, supra at 482, 105 S.Ct. 2787, the clauses are nonetheless distinct in their natures. [7] The First Amendment provides: 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. Inasmuch as the First Amendment protects the freedom of speech, the word speech has often been dissected in order to determine what constitutes speech. In this pursuit, the United States Supreme Court has often focused on the subject of the speech. See, e.g., Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15, 93 S.Ct. 2607, 37 L.Ed.2d 419 (1973) (obscenity); Virginia State Bd. of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, Inc., 425 U.S. 748, 96 S.Ct. 1817, 48 L.Ed.2d 346 (1976) (commercial speech); Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 315 U.S. 568, 62 S.Ct. 766, 86 L.Ed. 1031 (1942) (fighting words); RAV v. City of St. Paul, 505 U.S. 377, 112 S.Ct. 2538, 120 L.Ed.2d 305 (1992) (hate speech). In fact, case law on freedom of speech has developed a bifurcated analysis differentiating whether contested regulations on expression are content-neutral or content-based. See, e.g., Tribe, American Constitutional Law (2d ed.), § 12-2, pp. 791-792. However, while the text of the Free Speech Clause fairly invites an analytical focus on the subject of speech, the text of the Petition Clause, the right to petition, denotes a focus not on the identity of the speaker or subject matter, but the identity of the listener. The text of the First Amendment accordingly implies that where the government is the listener, the speaker's right to petition the government is at issue. This textual distinction is not, in my opinion, without significance. Rather, it signals the original intent of the Petition Clause to protect citizen input when presented in the form of a petition to government, regardless whether it would be considered speech or press under the sibling clauses of the First Amendment.