Revived after a decades-long slumber, the First Amendment's Assembly Clause has garnered robust attention of late. Endeavoring to reinvigorate this forgotten clause, legal scholars have outlined a normative vision of the assembly right that would better safeguard the freedom of association. This Note argues that such an approach-no matter its merits or its deficiencies-overlooks the Clause's central aim. The assembly right is in fact best understood as an assembly right, not as a right about associations. This Note advances that proposition by closely analyzing the text and the history of the Assembly Clause, a project that has not yet been systematically undertaken. The evidence unearthed from this inquiry demonstrates that the Assembly Clause seeks, as its first-order concern, to protect in-person, flesh-and-blood gatherings. Such protection is thus ultimately of great import in rethinking both the freedoms afforded and the constraints imposed on dissent within our constitutional framework.
