Who's Afraid of Ceballos?

Kermit Roosevelt

Most of the commentary on the Ceballos decision has been negative, including posts by Jack and Marty here. I confess I'm not that troubled by the decision. I think that it takes essentially the right view of the problem of public employee speech. At the least, to damn with faint praise, it's not the worst thing about the Court's employee speech jurisprudence.

The reason employee speech presents such a difficult problem is that the participants are occupying multiple roles, and the different roles possess very different rights and powers. The government as sovereign generally may not punish citizens for the content of their speech, but the government as employer may demand that employees do the job they were hired to do, and insofar as effective performance of that job requires saying some things and not others, it can control their speech. Correlatively, individuals as citizens retain their rights to free speech, but as employees they are subject to job-related sanctions such as dismissal if their speech compromises their performance.

If we think of the issue this way, the majority opinion in Ceballos is essentially doing nothing more than following a syllogism. The government can fire employees based on job performance. When employees speak as part of their employment duties, they are performing the job. Therefore, they can be fired for such speech.

I take this to be quite a narrow holding. Marty notes that the Court did not purport to overrule Givhan v. Western Line Consol. School Dist., 439 U.S. 410 (1979), which held that an English teacher's complaints to a school principal about racism in hiring were protected speech, and I think Justice Kennedy's treatment of that case shows the limits of Ceballos. The controlling factor, Kennedy says, is that Ceballos' expressions "were made pursuant to his duties as a calendar deputy." Thus, Ceballos does not mean that employees get no protection for speech made on the job, or to their employers. I would not even read it to mean that speech made in the course of invoking an internal grievance procedure is unprotected, for those procedures are optional. It means only that when part of an employee's job is the production of certain speech, he or she can be dismissed if that speech is deemed unsatisfactory.

What is so wrong with this reasoning? One response has been that it creates strange anomalies: an employee whose duty it is to uncover wrongdoing and report it to superiors receives no protection for doing so, while an employee whose duties are different does. And the employee whose duty is to uncover wrongdoing is protected if he writes a letter to the editor of a local newspaper, but the same speech is not protected if submitted to a supervisor in a memo.

But why are these anomalies? They follow quite naturally from the distinction between employee speech and citizen speech. And I do not find that distinction as artificial or formal as others have. I think it does a reasonable job of tracking the difference between speech that is important to the First Amendment and speech that is not. From the perspective of speakers, employee speech to employers is likely to be low value. Employee speech, when it is part of an employee's job description, is both compelled and constrained by the job description. It is unlikely to be a significant source of self-actualization, except in the rare case of employees (such as academics, of whom more later) whose job description does not place content-based restraints on their required speech. (When such speech is not part of the job description, it is appropriately conceptualized as a citizen speech to the government, which should get more protection; and this is how I would think about Givhan.)

From the perspective of listeners, which I tend to favor in thinking about First Amendment issues, employee to employer speech is also low value. Public employees are certainly well-placed to know what is wrong with the agencies they work for, and their speech to the public has great First Amendment value. But their speech to employers does not. That speech is valuable in terms of helping the employer; it can contribute greatly to government efficiency, and it arguably should be protected by statute. But governmental efficiency is not a First Amendment value--indeed, my main objection to the Court's employee speech jurisprudence is that it places too high a value on government efficiency, at the expense of real First Amendment values like public oversight of government.

Another problem, Jack suggests, is that the upshot is that First Amendment protection goes to the wrong speech--to the less informed employees who are speaking about matters outside their expertise. I agree with Jack's suggestion that there is relatively little First Amendment value in speech like that at issue in Rankin v. McPherson, 483 U.S. 378 (1987) (the sheriff's dispatcher who, commenting on the Reagan assassination attempt, said "If they go for him again, I hope they get him."). But as I said above, I also think there is little First Amendment value in even an expert report submitted as part of an employee's duties. (Again, this is not to say that there isn't great value in terms of possible contribution to governmental efficiency, just that it has little to do with either self-actualization or democratic self-governance, which are the standard First Amendment desiderata.)

What about Ceballos' implications for academic freedom? I think that it's actually quite hard to make out a right to academic freedom that protects employees of state universities in a manner similar to the protections citizens enjoy. After all, they are judged on the content of their expression, and sometimes fired for it, when they undergo tenure review. If they are not fired, tenure is what protects them, and I don't think that the First Amendment requires a tenure system in public universities. If state universities abolished tenure and started making promotion or retention contingent on approved viewpoints, that would certainly destroy their academic reputations, but I don't think that Party Line University is unconstitutional. (Perhaps the best argument on the other side is that some job descriptions effectively create public forums, within which the government cannot engage in certain kinds of discrimination. But if the government wants to create a university that promotes only its own viewpoints, I think it can do so.)

What we should be concerned about, I think, is not Ceballos so much as the whole Connick-Pickering regime under which employee speech never receives full First Amendment protection but is protected at most by a relatively anemic balancing test. This approach chills the speech that is most important from the perspective of self-governance: speech from the employees to the public. As long as that speech is protected, I'm not worried if intragovernmental speech is not. I'm not even worried if on-the-job speech that isn't part of an employee's duties isn't protected--that is, I think we could say that the speech in Rankin isn't protected with very little cost to the First Amendment. What is needed (and this is an argument I made in my student note some years ago) is a safe harbor where employee speech can be fully protected subject to some narrow exceptions for speech that harms working relationships (e.g., criticism of direct superiors) or that suggests the employee is somehow unfit to do his or her job (e.g., racist speech by a police officer). With such a safe harbor (in my note, I suggested off-the-job speech), we can be relatively confident that the speech that does have value from the First Amendment perspective will not be suppressed.

Posted 5:15 PM by Kermit Roosevelt [link]