Chapter 6 examines the special challenges public carry of firearms pose for public protest. Arming public protests is incompatible with peaceful forms of dissent. It threatens to intimidate protesters and chill protected First Amendment activity in the public square. The chapter proposes several measures that can reduce or eliminate these harms, including prohibitions on public carry at permitted events, bans on armed groups in public places, and place restrictions deemed presumptively valid under the Second Amendment. The Supreme Court has recently issued an expansive interpretation of public carry rights, based on the nation’s historical practice of gun regulation. But there is historical support for at least some restrictions on public carry at or near public protest events. Even if the best that can be done is a ban on open carry, that would alleviate some of the most nefarious effects public carry has on public protest.

On 29 March 2008, Zimbabwe’s ninth poll took place. Zanu PF felt insecure being in power, legitimised by only 47 and 19.5 per cent in the 2005 parliamentary and senate election, respectively. Following changes to the Constitution of Zimbabwe in September 2007, the electorate was asked to vote for a set of four political representatives for: president, parliament, senate and local government council. The 2008 socio-economic contexts showed that the electoral playing field and election processes and outcomes echoed excesses of previous flawed elections. The 29 March and 27 June 2008 elections were critical watershed moments in that while the March elections were the most peaceful (and even enjoyable) since the genesis of Zimbabwe’s mega-crisis in 2000, the June run-off will go down in history as the bloodiest since independence. The pre-poll arena for the harmonised elections had hallmarks of a rigged election, especially the use of state-financed patronage, poor voter education, the decrepit state of the voters’ roll and the violent pronouncements by members of the military-security sector, all of which skewed the playing field in favour of the incumbent regime.

Argued December 11, 2002.Decided April 7, 2003.

Justice M. MATSUDA delivered the opinion of the Court.1

A central question this case presents is whether words have power and consequences. See Mari J. Matsuda et al., Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment (1993). We answer that question in the affirmative and hold that racist speech in the form of a burning cross is properly constrained by the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Chapter 2 demonstrates how, after 2000, ZANU-PF extended its political control over the judiciary by staffing its institutions with political appointees. Within the attorney general’s office, such political interference ran from the attorney general himself down to prosecutors working on ZANU-PF’s ‘instructions’. It argues, however, that when we look at the working conditions in the Attorney General’s office more closely, the fragmented hegemony of law within the Zimbabwean state becomes evident. ZANU-PF-instructed prosecutors – the ‘good boys’ – who were willing to set aside their professional conduct to toe the party political line, sat side by side with ‘rebel’ prosecutors, individuals who conducted themselves impartially and did their job ‘professionally’ in an effort to safeguard ‘substantive justice’. In its attempts to exert political control over the attorney general’s office, the ZANU-PF-led government had to contend with historical debates over state professionalism, which rooted law’s legitimacy in legal institutions’ capacity to deliver justice, and tied state authority to the protection of this capacity. In their performances, ‘rebel’ prosecutors positioned themselves as actors within a wider community of judicial officials, human rights lawyers, activists and citizens that shared this consciousness of the value of professionalism.