Court Mulls Protection for Public-Employee Speech

Washington

A case testing the limits of the First Amendment’s protections for speech by government employees came before the U.S. Supreme Court last week, as the justices considered whether extending constitutional protection to job-related speech would interfere with the operations of public agencies, including school districts.

The Oct. 12 arguments in Garcetti v. Ceballos (Case No. 04-473) concerned an assistant prosecutor in Los Angeles County, Richard Ceballos, who claimed that his superiors retaliated against him in 2000 after he alleged in a memorandum that a county sheriff’s deputy had significantly misrepresented the facts on an affidavit to obtain a search warrant. Mr. Ceballos later provided the memorandum to a defense attorney in the case, and testified at the hearing on a motion to challenge the search warrant.

After being allegedly demoted and ill-treated by his supervisors afterward, Mr. Ceballos sued, arguing that he was entitled to First Amendment protection for his speech. The case follows a line of Supreme Court cases on government employees’ speech that started with a landmark 1968 ruling in Pickering v. Board of Education of Township High School District 205. In that case, the court held that a teacher who was speaking as a citizen on an issue of public concern was protected by the...