Constitutional protection of the right to protest?
Michael C. Head · 2024
The United States has free speech rights formally shielded by the First Amendment and other constitutional provisions, notably in the Bill of Rights. However, serious doubts exist about the reality, efficacy and extent of even those protections, particularly in periods of serious political and social conflicts. By comparison, one of the particular, and revealing, features of the Australian legal framework, like the British, is the lack of a constitutionally entrenched bill of rights or any other explicit constitutional protection of the rights to free speech and protest. This deficiency points to the longstanding opposition in the ruling establishment to the constitutional enshrinement of these core democratic rights.