When You Sign A Petition, Should Your Name Be Secret?

Commentary
Inside the First Amendment

By Gene Policinski
First Amendment Center vice president/executive director

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”

In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, that phrase set out a central theme of the star-crossed lovers’ tragedy: Real meaning lies in individuals, not in their feuding families’ names.

The 45 words of the First Amendment are law rather than literature. But for the…