Litigation in the Public Square
A collection of recent litigation case studies
November 2019
The public square is not a place.
Yes, you can locate the public squares where Thomas Paine passed out a pamphlet called Common Sense and convinced fellow citizens to revolt. Yes, you can find town squares where sidewalk preachers expound, where trees are lit and where soccer teams are celebrated. You can even find, on a Hollywood lot, the square where Marty McFly traveled back to 1955. But the public square goes beyond location. From Red Square’s military parades to Tiananmen Square’s student protests, they are important not for their geography but for how they embody a national identity. The public square is not a place at all. It’s an idea about how people relate to their government and each other. In the United States, it is a particularly potent one. Hunton Andrews Kurth’s litigators have worked at length to define the rules that govern our public square – and, by extension, that shape our national identity.