I do not wish to appear a know-nothing but it occurs that ignorance of the law, although no excuse, is a prerequisite for commonsense application of the Constitution.
If one studies the evolution of case law, accretion by accretion, one can see how the Supreme Court and inferior courts have managed to literally re-interpret clause after clause of the Constitution to render its meaning precisely the opposite of its meaning when it was written. Each case moves the compass needle but a few degrees away from true North but at the end of the day the needle points directly South.
So when we read that it is unconstitutional to maintain the free flow of traffic from people who would willfully block it, because blocking it has now come to mean free speech, our reaction is one of common sense because we have not been brainwashed by the drip, drip of court decisions.
Clarence Thomas comes the closest to emancipating himself from the drips.
When we talk about “the law” we might mean two different things. One would be the body of all written statutes, culminating with the federal and state constitutions. The other would be the body of documented court customs as to how such written law is applied. It’s the second kind of “law” — case law — that by far can more greatly wreak havoc on the moral compass, and it’s encouraged by attorneys who feed garbage to courts until they get enough garbage blessed against the former common assumptions to make a difference. Even the proverbial blind pig gets an acorn now and then, and an occasional addition to case law is to the good more than the bad. But usually things get added because they are new not because they better illuminate the true intent.
Still, I’d like to know even what “case law” got blocking traffic transmogrified into a kind of speaking. I could see a complaint that the law doesn’t ban everyone equally from blocking traffic but only focuses upon a controversial group of people. But that’s not how the court seems to have reasoned. If it can be called reasoning.