At Mother Jones, Nia Evans has a sympathetic take on shutting down traffic as a protest tactic. Her sources say laws stiffening penalties against this tactic are unnecessary because it is already illegal everywhere, and dangerous because it is a vital form of dissent: arguments that would appear to be in some tension with each other. She also writes that the tactic has a long and honored history:
With or without a permit, shutting down traffic has always been an important tool for protesters. In the months leading up to the historic 1965 Voting Rights March from Selma to Montgomery, activists had to go to a federal court to secure a permit to legally assemble. Some local officials still declared their marches to be illegal. Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr., the district court judge who eventually issued the permit for the march that became known as “Bloody Sunday,” wrote in his decision that the court had a duty to draw a “constitutional boundary line” between the “competing interests of society” when protesters block highways and streets. That line should take into account “the enormity of the wrongs that are being protested and petitioned against.” In the case of voting rights, the judge wrote, “the wrongs are enormous. The extent of the right to demonstrate against these wrongs should be determined accordingly.”
It was good of Evans to include a link to that opinion. But it undercuts her case as well as that of the protesters. The paragraph she quotes opens thus:
This Court recognizes, of course, that government authorities have the duty and responsibility of keeping their streets and highways open and available for their regular uses. Government authorities are authorized to impose regulations in order to assure the safety and convenience of the people in the use of public streets and highways provided these regulations are reasonable and designed to accomplish that end.
The judge continues by noting that the right to protest
may also be exercised by marching, even along public highways, as long as it is done in an orderly and peaceful manner; and these rights to assemble, demonstrate and march are not to be abridged by arrest or other interference so long as the rights are asserted within the limits of not unreasonably interfering with the exercise of the rights by other citizens to use the sidewalks, streets and highways, and where the protestors and demonstrators are conducting their activities in such a manner as not to deprive the other citizenry of their police protection.
He goes on to explain that in this case, a march could be held without disrupting traffic and therefore should be allowed. Far from holding that protesters had any right at all to shut down traffic, the judge denied that they had such a right. I assume that this remains an accurate statement of the law, since — again, according to Evans’s article itself — shutting down traffic is at least a minor offense in every state.