Finally on January 28, 1840, the House adopted as a standing rule: “That no petition, memorial, resolution, or other paper praying the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, or any State or Territories of the United States in which it now exists, shall be received by this House, or entertained in any way whatever.” Because of efforts of John Quincy Adams, this rule was repealed five years later. The right of petition recognized by the First Amendment first came into prominence in the early 1830s, when petitions against slavery in the District of Columbia began ﬂowing into Congress in a constantly increasing stream, which reached its climax in the winter of 1835. The right of access to the courts is indeed but one aspect of the right of petition.” 1621 Certainly the right to petition extends to all departments of the Government. 1620 The right extends to the “approach of citizens or groups of them to administrative agencies (which are both creatures of the legislature, and arms of the executive) and to courts, the third branch of Government. It is no longer confined to demands for “a redress of grievances,” in any accurate meaning of these words, but comprehends demands for an exercise by the government of its powers in furtherance of the interest and prosperity of the petitioners and of their views on politically contentious matters.

is not as to the auspices under which the meeting is held but as to its purpose not as to the relations of the speakers, but whether their utterances transcend the bounds of the freedom of speech which the Constitution protects.” 1619 Furthermore, the right of petition has expanded.

Those who assist in the conduct of such meetings cannot be branded as criminals on that score. The holding of meetings for peaceable political action cannot be proscribed. is one that cannot be denied without violating those fundamental principles of liberty and justice which lie at the base of all civil and political institutions,-principles which the Fourteenth Amendment embodies in the general terms of its due process clause. Historically, therefore, the right of petition is the primary right, the right peaceably to assemble a subordinate and instrumental right, as if the First Amendment read: “the right of the people peaceably to assemble” in order to “petition the government.” 1618 Today, however, the right of peaceable assembly is, in the language of the Court, “cognate to those of free speech and free press and is equally fundamental. Finally Chapter 5 of the Bill of Rights of 1689 asserted the right of the subjects to petition the King and “all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning to be illegal.” 1617 1616 To this meager beginning are traceable, in some measure, Parliament itself and its procedures for the enactment of legislation, the equity jurisdiction of the Lord Chancellor, and proceedings against the Crown by “petition of right.” Thus, while the King summoned Parliament for the purpose of supply, the latter-but especially the House of Commons- petitioned the King for a redress of grievances as its price for meeting the financial needs of the Monarch, and as it increased in importance, it came to claim the right to dictate the form of the King’s reply, until, in 1414, Commons declared itself to be “as well assenters as petitioners.” Two hundred and fifty years later, in 1669, Commons further resolved that every commoner in England possessed “the inherent right to prepare and present petitions” to it “in case of grievance,” and of Commons “to receive the same” and to judge whether they were “fit” to be received.

The right of petition took its rise from the modest provision made for it in chapter 61 of the Magna Carta (1215). 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.

Right to assemble