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Lahmann v. Grand Aerie of Fraternal Order of Eagles10/12/2005
ble models are strikingly similar, frustrating attempts to trace the "bloodline" of Oregon's assembly clause to predecessors that predate the Indiana Constitution. There is no record of case law interpreting the assembly clause of the Indiana Constitution before the enactment of the Oregon Constitution.
Lacking useful evidence of the intent of the framers of either the Oregon or Indiana conventions concerning section 26, or its likely model, we are left to seek out "historical circumstances" more generally.
The right of the people to voice their concerns to governmental representatives is evident in the Magna Carta, but the predicate right to gather in order to deliberate matters appears to have grown out of the historical context of town governance in prerevolutionary America. A useful starting point for appreciating the significance of the right of assembly is eighteenth-century Massachusetts, where town assemblies served a vital role in government, and where British attempts to suppress assemblies would contribute to the declaration and preservation of assembly rights across the young nation.
John Adams's Letter to Abbe De Marly described town inhabitants' practice of gathering and deliberating issues of consequence in colonial Massachusetts:
"These towns contain upon an average, say six miles or two leagues square. The inhabitants who live within these limits are formed by law into corporations, or bodies politic, and are invested with certain powers and privileges, as for example, to repair the great roads or highways, to support the poor, to choose their selectmen, constables, collectors of taxes, and above all, their representatives in the legislature; as also, the right to assemble, whenever they are summoned by their selectmen, in their town halls, there to deliberate upon the public affairs of the town, or to give instructions to their representatives in the legislature. The consequences of these institutions have been, that the inhabitants, having acquired from their infancy the habit of discussing, of deliberating, and of judging public affairs, it was in these assemblies of towns or districts that the sentiments of the people were formed in the first place, and their resolutions were taken from the beginning to the end of the disputes and the war with Great Britain."
Charles F. Adams ed., 5 The Works of John Adams 492, 495 (1851) (emphasis added). In prerevolutionary Massachusetts (then a royal province), the work of the assembly of townspeople was a necessary element of local and regional governance. Margaret E. Monsell, "Stars in the Constellation of the Commonwealth": Massachusetts Towns and the Constitutional Right of Instruction, 29 New Eng L Rev 285, 288 (1995). The right of representation to the wider, royal provincial assembly "belonged to the town as a corporate body rather than to its inhabitants as individuals," so the deliberation and communication
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