Supreme Court Holds Public Employee Speech Not Protected by First Amendment
Over at SCOTUS Blog, Marty Lederman has two posts (one here and another here) addressing today’s Supreme Court ruling in Garcetti v. Ceballos, No. 04-473. Lyle Denniston also has a post on the decision. Here is an excerpt from Lederman:
Today, the Court took that very significant step, holding that “when public employees make statements pursuant to their official duties, the employees are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline.” This apparently means that employees may be disciplined for their official capacity speech, without any First Amendment scrutiny, and without regard to whether it touches on matters of “public concern” — a very significant doctrinal development . . .
And what does this decision portend for the constitutional rights of teachers in their classroom speech and in their scholarship? The answer is not yet clear. Here’s Justice Kennedy again: “There is some argument that expression related to academic scholarship or classroom instruction implicates additional constitutional interests that are not fully accounted for by this Court’s customary employee-speech jurisprudence. We need not, and for that reason do not, decide whether the analysis we conduct today would apply in the same manner to a case involving speech related to scholarship or teaching.”