Biography
William F. Davis was an itinerant street preacher who spent more than a decade challenging Boston's control of its public ground. A city ordinance of 1862 required the mayor's permit before anyone could deliver any sermon, lecture, address or discourse on city land. In 1884 Davis applied for permission to preach on Boston Common, was refused, preached anyway and was arrested. He went on preaching there for years, declining as a matter of principle to ask again, and the city fined him over and over; he would not pay, and in 1887 the state finally imprisoned him. He used the time to write Christian Liberties in Boston, a pamphlet which argued not only the freedom of religion he had claimed all along but something newer — that a permit system for open-air speaking was an offence against freedom of speech itself, at a time when almost no one framed the public square that way. Convicted again in 1894 for unlicensed preaching on the Common, he appealed to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, where Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. dismissed the claim in 1895 with the observation that the legislature might lawfully forbid public speaking on the Common exactly as the owner of a private house might forbid it in his parlour. The Supreme Court of the United States affirmed unanimously in Davis v. Massachusetts, 167 U.S. 43, argued March 25 and decided May 10, 1897, adopting Holmes's reasoning wholesale. The Davis rule — that public parks and streets carry no right of assembly against the government that owns them — governed American law until Hague v. Committee for Industrial Organization overturned it in 1939.
