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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Episode Transcript

SPEAKER_01 (00:00):
And back to the Civic Senior Podcast.
Today's guest is Dr.
Daniel Carpenter.
Dr.
Carpenter is the Emily S.
Freeman Professor of Governmentand the chair of the Department
of Government at HarvardUniversity.
His award-winning researchexplores how ordinary people
have shaped democracy throughpetitioning and public
mobilization.

(00:20):
He is the author of Democracy byPetition, 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 thefreedom of petition.

(00:42):
What is that?

SPEAKER_00 (00:43):
So it might help by first defining what a petition
is.
And a petition is a complaint orrequest.
It's often helpful to think,especially in the context of the
U.S.
Constitution, about complaint.
And the U.S.
Constitution defines the rightto petition as Congress shall

(01:08):
make no law, right, whichrestricts, and I'm paraphrasing
here slightly, the right of thepeople to petition the
government for redress ofgrievances.
Now, petition was often morewidely understood as something
that could also be a request.
It could be a request for afavor, it could be a request for

(01:31):
pardon, it could be a requestfor the redress of different
grievances.
But just step back for a minute,and a grievance is something
that troubles us as a citizen ora body of citizens.
The way I've put it before in myown scholarship is that what the
petition does is it conveys aset of emotions and sort of

(01:56):
judgments about the unjustnessor unfairness of a situation or
the trouble one is experiencingand conveys those into a
presentation to the governmentor to an office.
And when I say presentation, itcould be written, although in
the long, long history ofpetitions, sometimes that was a

(02:17):
matter of presenting themorally.
Okay.
And so a couple importantfeatures about this.
First off, petitioning is very,very old.
And so the right to petition isalso very, very old.
At some level, it predates theMagna Carta in England, although

(02:38):
in one of the later clauses ofthe Magna Carta, the right to
petition is basically codifiedin a way.
But I think what we need tolearn about Magna Carta, or when
we think about Magna Carta,there were a whole bunch of
charters of liberties that weresort of, if you will, bouncing

(02:59):
around Europe during the 11thand 12th centuries.
Magna Carta is actually one ofthe later ones.
And what Magna Carta did is itwas an agreement, if you will,
between King John and hisbarons.
And they had already petitionedto him to complain about a
number of aspects of his rule.

(03:19):
And in part, what happens inMagna 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 exampleof kind of how this ethic of
petitioning goes back to theRoman Empire.
You know, it's as old as perhapsany human society.
So there's a story that thewriter Cassius Dio tells about

(03:42):
the Emperor Hadrian.
He's walking along one day, anda woman approaches him.
He's the emperor, right?
The emperor of the Roman Empire.
And a woman approaches him andsays, Hey, I need to bug you
about something.
I've got an issue here.
And he says, I don't really havetime for you.
And of course, I'm paraphrasinghere.

(04:03):
And then she says, Well, thenwhy are you emperor?
If not, and you know, inparentheses, if not to listen to
the complaints of your subjects.
Keep in mind, this is not ademocratic system.
This woman doesn't have theright to vote, nor do most
people in Imperial Rome.
I mean, there's a tiny bit ofvoting that goes on in the
Senate and things like that.
But the bottom line is even insuch an autocratic system like

(04:27):
that, it was expected thatpeople would respond to a
petition.
They didn't always say yes.
Fast forward to what happens inMagna Carta, that ethic becomes
embodied in a right, right?
A right that is very much kindof a property of English
constitutionalism and commonlaw.
Then later on, we get arestatement of the fundamental

(04:51):
right to petition in the EnglishBill of Rights, which responded
to a period in which during theCavalier Parliament in the early
1660s, Parliament under theleadership of or in concert with
Charles II basically restrictedthe right of the English people

(05:12):
to petition on a number ofthings.
It's a longer story.
Basically, the Bill of Rightswas basically an understanding
that no, you know, they can't dothat anymore.
And then let's think about then,like, you know, fast forward a
couple hundred years, a hundredyears, what does what does the
right to petition look like inthe First Amendment context?

(05:32):
And I would say a couple ofthings about that.
So the first is it was clearlysomething that they didn't want
Congress to limit the ability ofanybody to petition, just as in
the 1660s, Parliament hadlimited the right of the English
people to petition.

(05:52):
The second is there were anumber of restrictions upon
petitioning that Parliament hadalso tried to implement over the
preceding centuries, either onthe right of the British North
American people to petition fromtheir colonies to Parliament, or

(06:12):
on the ability of British peopleto petition.
So there was one particularstatute that tried to limit the
ability of people to petition onany matter concerning taxes.
So you could petition onreligion, you could petition for
an appointment, you couldpetition for indemnity if a
hurricane or a fire destroyedyour house.

(06:32):
Early legislatures were oftenkind of functional insurance
outfits, things like that.
A lot of petitions of that sort,right?
But it was clear that with theexperience of George III and the
parliaments of the 1700s,especially after the Stamp Act
crisis, that the colonists andthen the revolutionaries, the

(06:54):
founders, wanted to protect thatright to petition.
So I'd say that's number one,they had seen legislative and
monarchical abuse of ortrampling upon the right to
petition, and they wanted toprotect it.
The second thing is it'sinteresting that our First
Amendment says Congress shallmake no law that you know limits

(07:16):
the right to petition thegovernment.
Because before the U.S.
Bill of Rights, right, the firstTen Amendments to our
Constitution, there were anumber of state constitutions
that came out of therevolutionary period, and a
number of them had embeddedrights to petition.
And in a number of thoseconstitutions, the right to

(07:40):
petition was confined to thelegislature.
So if you look at, for instance,the Massachusetts Constitution
of 1780, which is kind of afundamental document in the sort
of development of Americanconstitutionalism, it's pretty
far down the list, although thatdoesn't say anything about
emphasis.
But you have a right topetition, but it is understood
as a right to petition thelegislature.

(08:03):
I think it's inescapable thatwhen the founders and the first
Congress put the right topetition the government into our
Constitution, they mean, theyalmost have to mean that it
can't simply be limited to theright to petition Congress.

(08:25):
And one bit of evidence for thatis that a major institution in
George Washington's presidencywas actually petitioning the
president.
And in fact, there were verycommon petitions in the first
Congress and throughout theearly republic of petitioning
the Secretary of the Treasury,right, or the Secretary of War,

(08:50):
or even lower-leveladministrators, what we would
today call bureaucrats.
And I take from that that reallyevery part of the government can
be petitioned.
And in part, that was not simplya right, but kind of a culture
that was there.

(09:10):
I mean, petitioning was verycommon during this period.
It was extremely common in thestates and localities, but it
was also very common at thenational level.
And so when you think about thatright to carry your complaints
and your requests, it's reallyinteresting that the First
Amendment petition clause is insome ways expansive and more

(09:30):
expansive than the statelegislative constitution, the
state constitutions of the1770s.
It really is not simply, okay,we get to petition Parliament or
we get to petition, you know,Congress.
We get to petition not simplythe legislature, but also the
president and also the executivebranch or administrators or

(09:54):
offices and officers of the U.S.
government.

SPEAKER_01 (10:01):
So Dr.
Carpenter, what does the rightto petition look like in today's
society?
And how is it different from thefreedom of speech?

SPEAKER_00 (10:11):
Great, great question.
So a couple of things.
The actual habit of say sendingpetitions into Congress and then
they are read on the floor ofthe Congress, as happened all
the way until roughly 1950, haskind of died out.
You know, you and I can sign apetition online today, and what

(10:32):
I often tell my students atHarvard and elsewhere is really
those petitions are kind ofdifferent.
It's not like they'remeaningless, but they often just
go out into the ether.
There's no one there on theother side to respond to them.
So if we think in historicalcontext, the idea was exactly
like that woman bugging theEmperor Hadrian, you know, more

(10:54):
than 2,000 years ago, or roughly2,000 years ago, saying, you
know, I expect a response.
And the response might be no,right?
I expect a response, I expect tobe heard.
And that at some level hassomewhat died out.
One sees the petition havingbeen replaced by a number of

(11:14):
different forms of activity.
One is the lawsuit, right?
Which you can think of as a formof petition, but it requires a
lot of cost.
It often requires representationof somebody who is admitted to
the bar at a various court oflaw, things like that.
And it doesn't f have all thefunctions that petitions did

(11:38):
historically.
The other thing is lobbying,right?
Lobbying is in some wayspetitioning.
And there's an argument, I thinka strong one, that certain forms
of lobbying are in factprotected by the petition
clause.
But one thing I would say that'sa little bit different about the
notion of the right to speechand the right to petition is

(12:02):
that petitions have always beenunderstood to be public.
Now, there might be somewheretucked in the millennia of human
history an anonymous petition.
But it would almost have made nosense for most of human history
because the idea is if you werecoming to complain to the
emperor, the king, the pope,bishops, you know, the governor,

(12:25):
the legislature, the president,you in order to be made whole,
they would have to respond toyou, the petitioner.
And that you could be anindividual like you or me, or it
could be a collective like a achurch, a town, a set of
weavers, uh, you know, uh agroup of people uh committed to

(12:49):
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 isthat, you know, there has been
some jurisprudence on this.
And I say it not really becausenecessarily the jurisprudence
and the court rulings matter.
It's just so much that I thinkthey clarify what may be

(13:12):
different about the right topetition and the right to
speech.
I think the right to free speechprotects anonymous speech.
So I can go online and I can Imean there's still, you know,
issues of defamation and allsorts of other things, but I can
go online under an alternativepersona.
I can write as publius, I canwrite as brutus, I can write as

(13:33):
something, right?
And and that I can do, and I cansay generally many, many
different kinds of things andmake many, many different kinds
of claims, and that isprotected.
Once I petition the government,I am now engaging in speech that
is directed to the holder of agovernment office.

(13:56):
It could be the legislature, itcould be the courts, could be,
again, the executiveadministrative.
And at that point, I think therewould have been wide cultural
agreement that if I am trying toinfluence directly with a
request or a complaintgovernment decision-making, then
I need to enter the publicsphere to do so.

(14:21):
And people have then guessedabout, well, what does this mean
at some level?
And at some level it means thatcertain kinds of communications
with the government on mattersof policy, especially in a
legislative setting, but maybenot purely a legislative
setting, need to have somedegree of publicity to them.

(14:41):
The petitioner really can't beanonymous.
And in part because if I speakto you or disagree with you, or
you and I have a debate, you andI are making claims toward each
other.
If I speak to the governmentthat affects policy such that
they even decide to spend aslittle as a dollar on my cause,

(15:02):
that's a dollar they're notspending on somebody else's
cause.
And therefore it becomes apublic matter.
There's a great article in theStanford Law Review by Maggie
Blackhawk, who's a reallyfantastic constitutional law
scholar, just a legal andsomewhat of a legal historian.

(15:23):
She does a million differentthings, but um, it's in the
Stanford Law Review on it'scalled Lobbying and the Petition
Clause that makes something likethis argument, I'm I'm adding a
few other details.
So I think that at the end ofthe day is really the main
difference, even though it mightnot leap out.
I think another differencebetween petitioning and speech

(15:45):
would simply be the kind ofspeech.
I mean, a cr a petition cancontain criticism, right?
But if I send a message to thePresident or Congress to say,
you know, you're doing thispolicy all wrong, and even maybe
suggest something else, it's notnecessarily a petition in the
sense of, okay, I am coming toyou to request something.

(16:09):
I think the only other thing Iwould say about petitioning is
it tends to be over the long runsomewhat more deferential.
At least that was its history inmany cases.
Although many early petitions,even early in American history
and over the course of Englishand European history, they had
an official language ofdeference, like we come to you,

(16:29):
oh sovereign, you know, to thegovernment, and we we are your
humble petitioners.
But then they would ask forpretty radical things, you know,
like say the abolition ofslavery or like the toleration
of Protestants or things likethat in say Catholic Europe,
things like that.
Yeah.

unknown (16:46):
Dr.

SPEAKER_01 (16:46):
Carver, thank you so much for your expertise and for
really digging into what thefreedom of petition is.
Because again, the FirstAmendment has lots of different
things in it, and petition islast.
But I really appreciate youexplaining that, but then also
explaining to us the differencebetween speech and petition.

(17:06):
So thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 (17:08):
Thank you.
It's an honor to be here.