A couple of people, both of whom I respect a great deal, asked me for a First Amendment analysis of the students’ trying to orate about the Israel-Palestine conflict at the class party at Berkeley Dean Erwin Chemerinsky’s home. Happy to oblige!
[1.] Some people have argued that the party was a public law school function, and thus not just a private event. I’m not sure that’s right—but I don’t think it matters.
Even if Berkeley law school put on a party for its students in a law school classroom, students still couldn’t try to hijack that for their own political orations. Rather, much government property is a “nonpublic forum”—a place where some members of the public are invited, but which is “‘… not by tradition or designation a forum for public communication'” (Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky (2018), quoting a leading 1983 case).
In a nonpublic forum, the government acting as proprietor may impose restrictions so long as they are “reasonable and viewpoint-neutral.” (The restrictions need not be content-neutral, by the way, so long as they are viewpoint-neutral; and I expect that Dean Chemerinsky wouldn’t have tolerated this sort of political speechmaking at their dinner by anyone.)
This is because the government has the “power to preserve the property under its control for the use to which it is lawfully dedicated.” If the place is a room opened up to students for listening to a lecture, or if it’s open for dinner or lunch or a party, people have no First Amendment right to bring microphones and take the event over for their own political diatribes.