How The Right To Petition Shapes Government Responses

What if the most underrated line of the First Amendment is the one that asks for a reply? We sit down with Dr. Daniel Carpenter of Harvard to explore the right to petition—what it is, where it came from, and why it still shapes how power listens. From a Roman subject pressing Emperor Hadrian for attention to the barons who forced Magna Carta, petitioning has long been the channel that turns private grievance into public business.

We walk through the pivotal moments that cemented this right: the English Bill of Rights pushing back on Parliament’s restrictions, and the American founders’ decision to protect petitions to the entire government—not just Congress. Early Americans used it loudly and often, directing petitions to the president, cabinet secretaries, and local officials. For generations, Congress read petitions aloud, signaling not just a right to speak but an expectation to be heard. That culture of response gave petitioning its force in everyday governance.

Then we draw a sharp line between petitioning and free speech. Speech can be anonymous; petitioning historically cannot. When you ask government for action—spending a dollar, changing a rule—you step into the public square with your name, inviting accountability and a formal reply. We dig into how lobbying and lawsuits map onto the petition clause, why many online petitions feel like shouting into the void, and how modern institutions could restore trust with transparent intake and timely answers. Along the way, Dr. Carpenter shows how deferential language once carried radical aims, from abolishing slavery to expanding toleration, proving that respectful form can deliver transformative substance.

If you care about civic power, administrative accountability, and how ordinary people move policy, this conversation will sharpen your toolkit. Subscribe, share with a friend who loves history and law, and leave a review with one question you would petition your government to address.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Guest Introduction
• 1:35 Defining Petitions And Grievances
• 3:58 Ancient Roots And Magna Carta
• 6:55 English Bill Of Rights And Limits
• 7:35 Petitioning Across U.S. Government Branches
• 11:33 Petitions Today Versus Free Speech
• 12:50 Public Nature Of Petitioning
• 15:59 Deference And Radical Demands
• 18:19 Closing Thanks

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:46

And back to the Civic Senior Podcast. Today's guest is Dr. Daniel Carpenter. Dr. Carpenter is the Emily S. Freeman Professor of Government and the chair of the Department of Government at Harvard University. His award-winning research explores how ordinary people have shaped democracy through petitioning and public mobilization. He is the author of Democracy by Petition, Popular Politics and Transformation, 1790 to 1870, and several other acclaimed works on political development, regulation, and the history of American governance. Within the First Amendment, there's lots of different clauses, but one of them is the freedom of petition. What is that?

SPEAKER_00: 1:30

So it might help by first defining what a petition is. And a petition is a complaint or request. It's often helpful to think, especially in the context of the U.S. Constitution, about complaint. And the U.S. Constitution defines the right to petition as Congress shall make no law, right, which restricts, and I'm paraphrasing here slightly, the right of the people to petition the government for redress of grievances. Now, petition was often more widely understood as something that could also be a request. It could be a request for a favor, it could be a request for pardon, it could be a request for the redress of different grievances. But just step back for a minute, and a grievance is something that troubles us as a citizen or a body of citizens. The way I've put it before in my own scholarship is that what the petition does is it conveys a set of emotions and sort of judgments about the unjustness or unfairness of a situation or the trouble one is experiencing and conveys those into a presentation to the government or to an office. And when I say presentation, it could be written, although in the long, long history of petitions, sometimes that was a matter of presenting them orally. Okay. And so a couple important features about this. First off, petitioning is very, very old. And so the right to petition is also very, very old. At some level, it predates the Magna Carta in England, although in one of the later clauses of the Magna Carta, the right to petition is basically codified in a way. But I think what we need to learn about Magna Carta, or when we think about Magna Carta, there were a whole bunch of charters of liberties that were sort of, if you will, bouncing around Europe during the 11th and 12th centuries. Magna Carta is actually one of the later ones. And what Magna Carta did is it was an agreement, if you will, between King John and his barons. And they had already petitioned to him to complain about a number of aspects of his rule. And in part, what happens in Magna Carta is there's a whole bunch of rights set out, including the right to petition. But petitioning goes way back. I'll just give you one example of kind of how this ethic of petitioning goes back to the Roman Empire. You know, it's as old as perhaps any human society. So there's a story that the writer Cassius Dio tells about the Emperor Hadrian. He's walking along one day, and a woman approaches him. He's the emperor, right? The emperor of the Roman Empire. And a woman approaches him and says, Hey, I need to bug you about something. I've got an issue here. And he says, I don't really have time for you. And of course, I'm paraphrasing here. And then she says, Well, then why are you emperor? If not, and you know, in parentheses, if not to listen to the complaints of your subjects. Keep in mind, this is not a democratic system. This woman doesn't have the right to vote, nor do most people in Imperial Rome. I mean, there's a tiny bit of voting that goes on in the Senate and things like that. But the bottom line is even in such an autocratic system like that, it was expected that people would respond to a petition. They didn't always say yes. Fast forward to what happens in Magna Carta, that ethic becomes embodied in a right, right? A right that is very much kind of a property of English constitutionalism and common law. Then later on, we get a restatement of the fundamental right to petition in the English Bill of Rights, which responded to a period in which during the Cavalier Parliament in the early 1660s, Parliament under the leadership of or in concert with Charles II basically restricted the right of the English people to petition on a number of things. It's a longer story. Basically, the Bill of Rights was basically an understanding that no, you know, they can't do that anymore. And then let's think about then, like, you know, fast forward a couple hundred years, a hundred years, what does what does the right to petition look like in the First Amendment context? And I would say a couple of things about that. So the first is it was clearly something that they didn't want Congress to limit the ability of anybody to petition, just as in the 1660s, Parliament had limited the right of the English people to petition. The second is there were a number of restrictions upon petitioning that Parliament had also tried to implement over the preceding centuries, either on the right of the British North American people to petition from their colonies to Parliament, or on the ability of British people to petition. So there was one particular statute that tried to limit the ability of people to petition on any matter concerning taxes. So you could petition on religion, you could petition for an appointment, you could petition for indemnity if a hurricane or a fire destroyed your house. Early legislatures were often kind of functional insurance outfits, things like that. A lot of petitions of that sort, right? But it was clear that with the experience of George III and the parliaments of the 1700s, especially after the Stamp Act crisis, that the colonists and then the revolutionaries, the founders, wanted to protect that right to petition. So I'd say that's number one, they had seen legislative and monarchical abuse of or trampling upon the right to petition, and they wanted to protect it. The second thing is it's interesting that our First Amendment says Congress shall make no law that you know limits the right to petition the government. Because before the U.S. Bill of Rights, right, the first Ten Amendments to our Constitution, there were a number of state constitutions that came out of the revolutionary period, and a number of them had embedded rights to petition. And in a number of those constitutions, the right to petition was confined to the legislature. So if you look at, for instance, the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, which is kind of a fundamental document in the sort of development of American constitutionalism, it's pretty far down the list, although that doesn't say anything about emphasis. But you have a right to petition, but it is understood as a right to petition the legislature. I think it's inescapable that when the founders and the first Congress put the right to petition the government into our Constitution, they mean, they almost have to mean that it can't simply be limited to the right to petition Congress. And one bit of evidence for that is that a major institution in George Washington's presidency was actually petitioning the president. And in fact, there were very common petitions in the first Congress and throughout the early republic of petitioning the Secretary of the Treasury, right, or the Secretary of War, or even lower-level administrators, what we would today call bureaucrats. And I take from that that really every part of the government can be petitioned. And in part, that was not simply a right, but kind of a culture that was there. I mean, petitioning was very common during this period. It was extremely common in the states and localities, but it was also very common at the national level. And so when you think about that right to carry your complaints and your requests, it's really interesting that the First Amendment petition clause is in some ways expansive and more expansive than the state legislative constitution, the state constitutions of the 1770s. It really is not simply, okay, we get to petition Parliament or we get to petition, you know, Congress. We get to petition not simply the legislature, but also the president and also the executive branch or administrators or offices and officers of the U.S. government.

SPEAKER_01: 10:47

So Dr. Carpenter, what does the right to petition look like in today's society? And how is it different from the freedom of speech?

SPEAKER_00: 10:57

Great, great question. So a couple of things. The actual habit of say sending petitions into Congress and then they are read on the floor of the Congress, as happened all the way until roughly 1950, has kind of died out. You know, you and I can sign a petition online today, and what I often tell my students at Harvard and elsewhere is really those petitions are kind of different. It's not like they're meaningless, but they often just go out into the ether. There's no one there on the other side to respond to them. So if we think in historical context, the idea was exactly like that woman bugging the Emperor Hadrian, you know, more than 2,000 years ago, or roughly 2,000 years ago, saying, you know, I expect a response. And the response might be no, right? I expect a response, I expect to be heard. And that at some level has somewhat died out. One sees the petition having been replaced by a number of different forms of activity. One is the lawsuit, right? Which you can think of as a form of petition, but it requires a lot of cost. It often requires representation of somebody who is admitted to the bar at a various court of law, things like that. And it doesn't f have all the functions that petitions did historically. The other thing is lobbying, right? Lobbying is in some ways petitioning. And there's an argument, I think a strong one, that certain forms of lobbying are in fact protected by the petition clause. But one thing I would say that's a little bit different about the notion of the right to speech and the right to petition is that petitions have always been understood to be public. Now, there might be somewhere tucked in the millennia of human history an anonymous petition. But it would almost have made no sense for most of human history because the idea is if you were coming to complain to the emperor, the king, the pope, bishops, you know, the governor, the legislature, the president, you in order to be made whole, they would have to respond to you, the petitioner. And that you could be an individual like you or me, or it could be a collective like a a church, a town, a set of weavers, uh, you know, uh a group of people uh committed to the abolition of slavery, uh, things like that. And so there's been, you know, I'll just mention one of the interesting legal issues here is that, you know, there has been some jurisprudence on this. And I say it not really because necessarily the jurisprudence and the court rulings matter. It's just so much that I think they clarify what may be different about the right to petition and the right to speech. I think the right to free speech protects anonymous speech. So I can go online and I can I mean there's still, you know, issues of defamation and all sorts of other things, but I can go online under an alternative persona. I can write as publius, I can write as brutus, I can write as something, right? And and that I can do, and I can say generally many, many different kinds of things and make many, many different kinds of claims, and that is protected. Once I petition the government, I am now engaging in speech that is directed to the holder of a government office. It could be the legislature, it could be the courts, could be, again, the executive administrative. And at that point, I think there would have been wide cultural agreement that if I am trying to influence directly with a request or a complaint government decision-making, then I need to enter the public sphere to do so. And people have then guessed about, well, what does this mean at some level? And at some level it means that certain kinds of communications with the government on matters of policy, especially in a legislative setting, but maybe not purely a legislative setting, need to have some degree of publicity to them. The petitioner really can't be anonymous. And in part because if I speak to you or disagree with you, or you and I have a debate, you and I are making claims toward each other. If I speak to the government that affects policy such that they even decide to spend as little as a dollar on my cause, that's a dollar they're not spending on somebody else's cause. And therefore it becomes a public matter. There's a great article in the Stanford Law Review by Maggie Blackhawk, who's a really fantastic constitutional law scholar, just a legal and somewhat of a legal historian. She does a million different things, but um, it's in the Stanford Law Review on it's called Lobbying and the Petition Clause that makes something like this argument, I'm I'm adding a few other details. So I think that at the end of the day is really the main difference, even though it might not leap out. I think another difference between petitioning and speech would simply be the kind of speech. I mean, a cr a petition can contain criticism, right? But if I send a message to the President or Congress to say, you know, you're doing this policy all wrong, and even maybe suggest something else, it's not necessarily a petition in the sense of, okay, I am coming to you to request something. I think the only other thing I would say about petitioning is it tends to be over the long run somewhat more deferential. At least that was its history in many cases. Although many early petitions, even early in American history and over the course of English and European history, they had an official language of deference, like we come to you, oh sovereign, you know, to the government, and we we are your humble petitioners. But then they would ask for pretty radical things, you know, like say the abolition of slavery or like the toleration of Protestants or things like that in say Catholic Europe, things like that. Yeah.

unknown: 17:32

Dr.

SPEAKER_01: 17:33

Carver, thank you so much for your expertise and for really digging into what the freedom of petition is. Because again, the First Amendment has lots of different things in it, and petition is last. But I really appreciate you explaining that, but then also explaining to us the difference between speech and petition. So thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00: 17:55

Thank you. It's an honor to be here.