Title: Ferguson’s constitutional crisis: First Amendment violations are only part of the story.
Headings: Ferguson’s Constitutional Crisis
Ferguson’s Constitutional Crisis
On the streets of Missouri, it’s not just the First Amendment that’s being violated.
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Content: The First Amendment is whatever the cop on the beat says it is.” But as a former public defender told one of us on Wednesday, precisely the same thing is true for the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, and the Eighth Amendment, as well as a lot of the rest of the Bill of Rights. We ignore those other constitutional violations at our peril. This past term, the Supreme Court found it extremely easy (and in fact unanimously agreed) to see that a police’s warrantless search of a cellphone is unconstitutional. More than one commentator observed that it was very easy for the justices to find a constitutional affront here because they all have cellphones and can imagine how intrusive a police search of those phones would be. But it’s much harder for the courts, and even sometimes for the press, to imagine a lifetime of aggregated constitutional violations, from stop-and-frisk policies that disproportionately affect people of color, to civil forfeiture laws and the “war on drugs” that do the same. Advertisement
One need look no further than the current Supreme Court to understand that the First Amendment now plays an outsize role in the national constitutional conversation about everything ranging from money in politics to maintaining order around health clinics to limiting the reach of public-sector unions. And given that the First Amendment is—in Pac-Man fashion—beginning to swallow up all the rest of our doctrine, perhaps it’s no surprise that we see the First Amendment dominating the conversation on the ground in Ferguson as well. We all like to speak, regardless of race and income. And suppression of speech is something that offends all of us across race, gender, and economic lines.