New Jersey towns test the limits of protest permits as civil liberties groups push back
From permit deadlines to insurance demands, local fights in towns across New Jersey reveal a broader clash over who gets to take to the streets
When Lisa Davis went to a pro-Palestine demonstration in South Orange last year, she thought it’d be no different from the many other protests she’d frequented in the Essex County town.
But the March 2024 rally went sideways after a troublemaking counterprotester pulled up near Spiotta Park, caused a scene, and attracted the police.
Davis, of West Orange, sent the cops a cellphone video she’d taken of the incident, and all was quiet — until South Orange unexpectedly mailed her two summonses: one for using a bullhorn and another for holding a special event without a permit.
A judge later fined her $366 for violating the local code, even though she swears she did not organize the protest. Davis believes the town used an advance notice ordinance, which requires organizers to get a permit 10 days ahead of a demonstration, as a bludgeon against her because of her race, politics, and the event’s pro-Palestine message.
“There were several things going on, but racial profiling is at the top of the list,” Davis told The Jersey Vindicator. “This is not my first rodeo, being targeted … I’m Black, and anything they can do, they will. It’s just ridiculous … they’re weaponizing that ordinance against me.”
Her case, now under appeal, has illuminated civil rights activists’ worst fears: that local regulations demanding lengthy advance notice, proof of insurance, or other burdensome requirements could cast a pall over the fundamental American rights of freedom of speech and assembly.
And it’s a problem that’s unlikely to go away, as more and more towns throughout New Jersey consider, approve, and enforce local codes meant to keep political demonstrators on a short leash.
Experts said the seesaw battle between concerned local governments and their citizens has raged for decades. But during times of great strife, when burgeoning political movements protest in the streets with ever more frequency — that’s when public officials suddenly remember to vigorously enforce local ordinances.
“The attempt to stop [protests] goes way back. In fact, until shockingly recently, states and cities would completely outlaw any protests at all,” said Nadine Strossen, a senior fellow with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and the past national president of the American Civil Liberties Union.
“But I think what you’ll find is the more protest activity there is — that’s what incentivizes governments [to pass and enforce these laws],” Strossen said. “During the 1960s, the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations gave rise to a whole lot of cases about permits, which the Supreme Court struck down.”
Liza Weisberg, a senior staff attorney for the New Jersey chapter of the ACLU, added that the controversial demonstrations following Israel’s October 2023 invasion of the Gaza Strip likely drove much of the recent backlash.
“I think the movement for Palestinian rights has sparked a lot of protest — and a lot of aggressive response to that,” Weisberg said. “Whenever controversial speech is at the center of political discourse, you see aggressive enforcement of anti-protest laws. And we’ve seen this throughout history, particularly when students are leading these political movements.”
This shifting of the political winds “really threatens to infringe on First Amendment rights,” she said.
In South Orange, the town’s Democratic mayor, Sheena Collum, declined to comment on Davis’ specific case.
But she disputed the assertion that Davis’ prosecution was based on race, color, or creed. And officials said the troublemaking disruptor — who is white — also got a summons from the cops.
“South Orange is like the progressive capital of the world,” said Collum, a Democrat who ran for lieutenant governor on Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop’s ticket. “Folks love protesting, it’s like, what we do every single day. And we always encourage them.”
“But we just want to make sure it goes through a process,” Collum said. “Most organizers probably don’t even realize how much happens on the back end to make sure they’re supported and safe.”
The clerk’s office has never turned down a permit request, she said, and tries to be flexible whenever it can.
“That ordinance has been there forever; we haven’t touched it. And it’s worked,” Collum said. “But being anti-democratic is definitely not something we want to be known for.
‘The First Amendment is priceless’
In general, local officials can only restrict the time, place, and manner of a given demonstration — not its content or purpose, according to “Protests & Public Safety: A Guide for Cities and Citizens,” an online pamphlet from the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown University Law Center.
This means local governments can, for example, broadly limit when and where the protest will happen, how much noise demonstrators can make, or how many people can attend.
But the U.S. Supreme Court has said the conditions must be reasonable and allow for “ample alternative channels of expression,” said Strossen, of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
Beyond that, government officials must tread lightly, especially when it comes to advance notice.
Courts have struck down various laws demanding that organizers file their applications anywhere between five and 60 days before an event, the Georgetown pamphlet noted. At the same time, some judges have upheld advance notice periods of one, two, and nine days.
Some courts have also been very leery of any demand that organizers secure insurance policies, pay for the cost of police protection, or indemnify against damages, Strossen added.
Weisberg, of the ACLU, said this kind of financial burden can effectively kill protests in the cradle.
“They just silence those who can’t afford to pay the fees, and that’s really problematic,” she said. “And very broadly, any kind of financial conditions are really problematic.”
Strossen said that from a financial point of view, you just have to cover the cost somehow. “The First Amendment is priceless,” she said. “And you have to pay what it takes.”
There must also always be leeway for sudden protests that erupt after a given event, such as a police shooting, she said.
“Citizens have the right to react very quickly,” Strossen said. “If you want to protest something that happens today … you don’t have to apply for a permit and wait 10 days before you’re able to do it — that makes it untimely.”
Officials must also ensure each part of the ordinance is “content neutral,” which means it must be “written in a way that neither favors nor disfavors particular speakers or ideas,” she added.
Enforcement must be evenhanded as well, and any regulation that disproportionately punishes a particular idea or speaker is “automatically unconstitutional” because it violates the First Amendment, Strossen said.
Generally, ordinances must act as ministerial rulebooks that seek to maintain basic municipal services such as traffic coordination, litter collection, and police protection — but nothing more.
“They must serve some function that has absolutely nothing to do with stopping speech,” Strossen said.
‘A privilege to be bought’
Some towns have charged headlong into the fray, while others have taken a more cautious tack.
Officials in the Ocean County town of Lacey batted around potential restrictions in October after they found protesters had planned a “No Kings” rally against Donald Trump in front of the municipal building, according to Patch.
They’d only learned about the event from social media posts, and an earlier rally had cost the township thousands in overtime and cleanup costs, business administrator Veronica Laureigh told the local governing body.
She proposed a permit process that would include an insurance policy. But the township attorney cautioned elected leaders to approach the issue delicately.
In the end, the town “did nothing,” Laureigh said in an email to The Jersey Vindicator.
“Our main goal was to have open communication with the organizers as in advance as possible so we could plan for location, police coverage if necessary and traffic control,” she said.
Other towns, like Teaneck in Bergen County, waded into the fight in April after a split council approved a seven-day advance notice mandate.
The new ordinance bans special events within 100 feet of a town building, the property line of a residence, or a house of worship around service times.
The township manager can waive the requirement for a quick, breaking protest, but only after talking to the police chief and town attorney, according to the law.
That caveat gave some on the council pause.
“I’m just really concerned that we haven’t thought this through,” Teaneck Councilwoman Danielle Gee told colleagues, according to newspaper reports. She added that leaving the choice to a few officials could lead to “unintended bias and potential subjectivity.”
The rules were born of constant protests and infighting between the town’s Jewish and Muslim residents over the Israeli war in Gaza, political sources said.
But just a few months later, cops in Teaneck cited two people for coordinating a Hands Across New Jersey event in September that had seen its permit application denied because the organizers planned to block traffic, according to a report in The Record.
The rally, ironically intended to create a “living chain of resistance against authoritarianism” that stretched from the Hudson to the Delaware, ended when the cops issued the summonses and told everyone else to leave.
Teaneck Mayor Mark Schwartz brushed off concerns about the ordinance during a phone interview with The Jersey Vindicator, saying it was “thoroughly reviewed, edited, modified, and vetted by our attorneys and the public over many months before it was passed.”
“I firmly stand behind it, and any implementation and enforcement of it,” Schwartz said.
When asked if he was concerned about the ordinance’s wider free speech implications, Schwartz said he was “totally fine with it.”
“If people want to challenge it, by all means,” he said. “If challenged, we’ll defend it accordingly. And that’ll be for a judge to decide. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s a beautiful system we have here … people can agree to disagree, or they can take their gripes to the court of law. It’s Okay.”
Another example is West Caldwell, where officials recently abandoned a proposal requiring protest organizers to provide 30 days’ notice, pay municipal security and cleanup fees, and secure a $2 million insurance policy ahead of any demonstration.
“The ordinance appeared to be unconstitutional on its face,” Jeff Chase, a West Caldwell resident who went to the council meeting where the ordinance was introduced, told NBC New York. “It was really a chilling-type device on both assembly and free speech.”
Weisberg, of the ACLU, buttressed this in an eight-page letter she sent to town officials that pilloried, in detail, every piece of the proposal.
“The ordinance is unconstitutional and should not face a vote,” she wrote. “Fundamentally and fatally, it ‘treats the First Amendment as a privilege to be bought rather than a right to be enjoyed.’”
The town eventually backed off, tabling the measure in mid-September amid the mammoth public outcry.
But Weisberg didn’t take credit. Instead, she pointed to community outrage as the final nail in the ordinance’s coffin.
“What was so incredible about West Caldwell was that we sent our letter, but then we sort of sat back and let local advocates go to the town council and speak,” she said. “And there was just an incredible wave of outcry from folks in that community.”
“So, the ACLU can play a small role,” Weisberg said. “But what really makes a difference is people in their communities getting animated, going to their representatives and making their voices heard.”
West Caldwell’s mayor and every one of its council members ignored multiple inquiries by The Jersey Vindicator about the ordinance.
But in the end, these protest ordinances may have the unintended effect of making demonstrators even more stubborn — and more determined.
“If we don’t do it … well, the only reason why I can talk to you on the phone is because of people who protested, rose up and said, ‘This is wrong,’” said Davis, the woman who was cited by South Orange.
“It’s the only reason enslavement ever ended,” she said. “And the only reason the Constitution became applicable to everybody in the United States — it’s because people rose up, protested, and fought against these horrible things.”
“So yeah,” she said. “I’ve been to those protests since that time, and I will continue to go.”
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Steve Janoski is a multi-award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Post, USA Today, the Associated Press, The Bergen Record and the Asbury Park Press. His reporting has exposed corruption, government malfeasance and police misconduct