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Supreme Court re-argument on employee speech
March 19, 2006 by Ross Runkel at LawMemo
A rare event: The US Supreme Court will hear a second argument in Garcetti v. Ceballos - a significant employee free speech case.
This case was argued on October 12, 2005, and the Court ordered that it be re-argued on March 21, 2006. The main intervening event was the retirement of Justice O'Connor and the appointment of Justice Alito. The conventional wisdom is that the Court was split 4-4, and needs Justice Alito's vote to break the tie.
Richard Ceballos, a deputy district attorney, 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 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.
- Decision below: Ceballos v. Garcetti (9th Cir 03/22/2004)
- Supreme Court briefs and transcript of first argument
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Editor: Ross Runkel, Professor of Law Emeritus. email Ross@LawMemo.Com, Phone 503-399-8028. Copyright LawMemo, Inc.
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