Minnesota Lawyer
In light of the OccupyMN protest underway in Minneapolis as we speak (or rather, as you read this), it’s worth reading a short piece in the Wall Street Journal Law Blog on the legal boundaries of peaceful demonstration.
At issue, legally speaking, in city after city is the extent to which police can step in to try to contain or break up protests. …
The problem, of course, is figuring out whether a mass protest has, in fact, become sufficiently disruptive to justify police crashing the party. Making matters tricky, officers often have to make split-second decisions, amid the din and chaos of a mass demonstration, about whether to arrests protesters. …
At least one court will have the opportunity to interpret the First Amendment in a dispute involving an Occupy Wall Street demonstration. On Tuesday, a group of Occupy protesters filed suit in Manhattan federal court, claiming the New York Police Department improperly arrested about 700 people who were marching last week across the Brooklyn Bridge.
Hopefully Minneapolis will be spared from the long tail of protracted proceedings that a similar dispute would likely cause (reporters from the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul just settled with law enforcement last week), but we thought we’d lay down this marker as a reference point just in case.
An important note: If, say, Saturday night you find that the crowd gathered in front of the Government Center has turned decidedly more gruesome, fear not. It’s (most likely) because tomorrow is the annual Zombie Pub Crawl, and NOT because the OccupyMN crowd has decided that one of their demands is to raise the dead. (Though we predict at least a few will be dressed as “zombie banks” so as to make a trenchant satirical statement amidst the gallons of free-flowing booze and dyed corn syrup.)
