Protesters Can’t Use Speeches To Disrupt Supreme Court

A decades-old statute that disallows protesters from making “a harangue or oration” to disrupt the Supreme Court will stand, after a ruling this week by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The lawsuit was brought by protesters who, in 2015, stood one after the other to speak in the nation’s highest court, to disturb oral arguments. They defended the protest, claiming the statute’s wording was so old-fashioned it could not be clearly interpreted. The court ruled that, though “harangue” and “oration” are no longer common, the meaning of the statute is indisputable. “[W]e are interpreting a statute, not restating a dictionary,” Judge Janice Rogers Brown wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel. “By employing two words that cover public speeches of myriad forms within a statute focused on the Supreme Court’s building and grounds, Congress’s use of ‘harangue’ and ‘oration’ indicates these terms are meant to cover any form of public speeches that tend to disrupt the Supreme Court’s operations.”