Freedom of Association/Limitations - Restrictions/Private curtailment
Is this right at times curtailed by private actors?
Philosophers and political theorists generally agree that it is sometimes necessary to curtail free association, but this agreement does not answer questions of which forms assembly and association can permissibly be restricted, how they should be limited, or who should control their regulation. It often falls to the government to decide when to step in during times of popular uprising or violent protest, but history also shows a number of instances in which private actors have curtailed citizens’ right to free association or assembly.
The most common way for private actors can curtail free association is by prohibiting assembly and demonstration on their privately-owned property. In U.S. law, there exists a precedent that protects citizens’ right to free association on public property precisely because the right is not guaranteed when it is practiced on private property. This doctrine was first introduced in 1936, when Jersey City mayor Frank Hague issued an ordinance prohibiting members of the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) from gathering in a public space and distributing “communist” literature (Garcia, “Hague v. Committee for Industrial Organization,”). The CIO, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, successfully argued that the New Jersey ordinance was unconstitutional under the First Amendment. Hague appealed to the Supreme Court, which upheld the original decision and struck the ordinance down (Garcia, “Hague v. Committee for Industrial Organization,”). Justice Owen Roberts justified the decision for Hague v. Committee for Industrial Organization by likening public spaces such as streets and parks to public forums, in which the free flow of ideas and discourse must be protected under the First Amendment. He made this ruling because he recognized that private actors retained the right to curtail citizens’ right to association when that association occurred on private property. In order to preserve the right to peaceable assembly, the Court’s decision set the precedent for the “public forum” doctrine, which continues to protect the right to association in public spaces to this day (Garcia, “Hague v. Committee for Industrial Organization,”). Writing for The First Amendment Encyclopedia, David Hudson writes that “in the Court’s forum-based approach, the government can impose reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions on speech in all three categories of property, but has limited ability to impose content-based restrictions on traditional or designated public forums” (Hudson, “Public Forum Doctrine