Time & Perspective Quote by Sol Wachtler

Wachtler’s line smuggles a constitutional absolute into a very un-absolute place: the shopping mall. By calling it an "open marketplace" and then slyly clarifying "called a mall", he collapses two meanings of marketplace that American law and culture have long tried to keep separate. One is civic: the metaphorical bazaar of ideas where speech competes and citizens decide. The other is commercial: privately owned property engineered to choreograph behavior, discourage friction, and keep the cash registers calm. His sentence works because it treats that collapse as obvious, even inevitable, daring the reader to deny that modern public life happens under corporate roofs.

The specific intent is judicial and strategic. Wachtler isn’t waxing poetic about democracy; he’s building a rationale for protecting expressive activity in quasi-public spaces that have replaced streets and town squares. The phrase "unquestioned right" is the pressure point: it frames any restriction not as a reasonable management choice by property owners, but as an abridgment of something foundational.

The subtext is an indictment of privatized public space. If the mall is where people actually gather, then excluding pamphleteers, protesters, or petitioners effectively edits the citizenry. Wachtler’s move is to treat architecture as politics: when the commons becomes retail, free expression can’t survive on nostalgia for sidewalks. The context is a late-20th-century judicial fight over whether First Amendment-style freedoms should follow people into the spaces where daily life has migrated, even when those spaces are owned, branded, and policed like a business.