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US Supreme Court re-argument in employee speech case
February 17, 2006 by Ross Runkel at LawMemo
The US Supreme Court has ordered that Garcetti v. Ceballos (Docket No. 04-473) be re-argued. This case was argued in October. Since then, Justice Alito has replaced Justice O'Connor.
Order for re-argument | Transcript of first oral argument (10/12/2005) | Decision below: Ceballos v. Garcetti (9th Cir 03/22/2004)
Ceballos sued his employer (the County) and his supervisors claiming they retaliated against him in violation of the 1st amendment. Ceballos wrote a memorandum to his supervisor in which he claimed that a deputy sheriff had lied in an application for a search warrant. Ceballos claimed that he was demoted in retaliation for this. The trial court granted summary judgment for the individual defendants on the ground of qualified immunity. The 9th Circuit reversed. The US Supreme Court granted certiorari on February 28, 2005 to review the 9th Circuit decision.
The 9th Circuit concluded that the individual defendants were not entitled to qualified immunity because "the law was clearly established that Ceballos' speech addressed a matter of public concern and that his interest in the speech outweighed the public employer's interest in avoiding inefficiency and disruption." A concurring 9th Circuit judge argued that the 9th Circuit's jurisprudence in this area of law is wrong. He would hold that public employees are not protected by the 1st amendment when their speech is uttered in the course of carrying out their employment obligations. That is because Connick v. Myers, 461 US 138 (1982), requires that the public employee be speaking "as a citizen," which the judge says Ceballos was not.
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