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Balkinization Symposiums: A Continuing List                                                                E-mail: Jack Balkin: jackbalkin at yahoo.com Bruce Ackerman bruce.ackerman at yale.edu Ian Ayres ian.ayres at yale.edu Corey Brettschneider corey_brettschneider at brown.edu Mary Dudziak mary.l.dudziak at emory.edu Joey Fishkin joey.fishkin at gmail.com Heather Gerken heather.gerken at yale.edu Abbe Gluck abbe.gluck at yale.edu Mark Graber mgraber at law.umaryland.edu Stephen Griffin sgriffin at tulane.edu Jonathan Hafetz jonathan.hafetz at shu.edu Jeremy Kessler jkessler at law.columbia.edu Andrew Koppelman akoppelman at law.northwestern.edu Marty Lederman msl46 at law.georgetown.edu Sanford Levinson slevinson at law.utexas.edu David Luban david.luban at gmail.com Gerard Magliocca gmaglioc at iupui.edu Jason Mazzone mazzonej at illinois.edu Linda McClain lmcclain at bu.edu John Mikhail mikhail at law.georgetown.edu Frank Pasquale pasquale.frank at gmail.com Nate Persily npersily at gmail.com Michael Stokes Paulsen michaelstokespaulsen at gmail.com Deborah Pearlstein dpearlst at yu.edu Rick Pildes rick.pildes at nyu.edu David Pozen dpozen at law.columbia.edu Richard Primus raprimus at umich.edu K. Sabeel Rahmansabeel.rahman at brooklaw.edu Alice Ristroph alice.ristroph at shu.edu Neil Siegel siegel at law.duke.edu David Super david.super at law.georgetown.edu Brian Tamanaha btamanaha at wulaw.wustl.edu Nelson Tebbe nelson.tebbe at brooklaw.edu Mark Tushnet mtushnet at law.harvard.edu Adam Winkler winkler at ucla.edu Compendium of posts on Hobby Lobby and related cases The Anti-Torture Memos: Balkinization Posts on Torture, Interrogation, Detention, War Powers, and OLC The Anti-Torture Memos (arranged by topic) Recent Posts Speech for the Anti-Woke Workplace
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Tuesday, July 01, 2025
Speech for the Anti-Woke Workplace
Guest Blogger
For the Balkinization symposium on Free Speech in Crisis and the Limits of the First Amendment. Elizabeth
Sepper A new form of employer speech
rights is burgeoning in the federal courts. Employers press for an expressive associational right to exclude unwanted workers.
Although the Supreme Court has said that “expressive association is
not reserved for advocacy groups,” in practice the right has extended to
organizations that bring people together to speak—for example, to amplify a
message, pursue civic goals, or unite coreligionists. The employment
relationship had not qualified. But that is quickly changing. A number of federal court
decisions now hold that expressive association shields employers from
antidiscrimination law. These cases—described in brief below—elide important
distinctions between work and voluntary membership groups. They highlight broader trends for the future of employer
speech. First, discriminatory conduct is becoming speech, and
antidiscrimination law unconstitutional regulation of expression. Second, the
cloak of religion has enabled courts to push speech doctrines toward
deregulatory ends. The presence of a religious party makes these moves more
palatable to some cross-section of the judiciary and the public. It suggests
that the pro-business tilt of First Amendment doctrine may be overtaken by a
pro-religion radicalism even more partial in its application. In the past five years, federal
courts have decided thirteen suits involving employer expressive association. They involve diverse
litigants—religiously affiliated schools and universities, nonprofits, social
service providers, for-profit businesses, and media companies. In just under
half, employers have succeeded—taking the right to expressive association far
beyond its foundations in the membership of voluntary groups. Consider Slattery v. Hochul from the Second Circuit. There,
a crisis pregnancy center chain challenged New York’s “boss bill” that
prohibits employment discrimination based on an individual’s pregnancy or other
reproductive decisions. It argued that the First Amendment grants it a right to
restrict employment to individuals whose reproductive and sexual decisions
align with employer values. The Second Circuit agreed. Applying
the three-prong test set by the Supreme Court in Boy Scouts of America v.
Dale, it first held that the employer qualified as an expressive
association due to its “expressive activity” of “shar[ing] their pro-life
message with the world.” What the court didn’t
do is provide any explanation for finding expressive association in
employer-employee relations. It said simply, “[c]ompelled hiring, like
compelled membership, may be a way in which a government mandate can affect in
a significant way a group’s ability to advocate public or private viewpoints.” The
court then deferred to the employer as to the burden on its ability to express
its views. It accepted both that every employee had to be “a reliable advocate”
of the employer’s message and that the mere presence of a woman who has had an
abortion significantly burdens her employer’s anti-abortion speech. Last, the
court held that the interests of the employer outweighed the state interest. Employees,
it said, can find other jobs. But the employer cannot continue to speak if it
must refrain from discrimination based on reproductive choices. A number of district courts have
proved receptive to these claims. Catholic educational systems with more than a
hundred schools have been granted an unqualified constitutional right against a
city ordinance similarly barring discrimination based on
reproductive healthcare.
Bear Creek Bible Church v. EEOC went so far as to grant expressive
association protection to a for-profit management company that refuses to
employ LGBTQ people or tolerate gender non-conforming conduct. These decisions
transform the labor contract into an association expressive of (employer)
values. The analysis, moreover, tends to apply to all employees, however menial
their role. Media companies have begun to
raise similar defenses against employment claims. Sued by a white, heterosexual
man for reverse race and sex
discrimination,
CBS moved to dismiss. It contended that the First Amendment shields it, because
an entity engaged in expression “has the right to select employees whose work
affects that expression.” Disney also invoked expressive association in defense of firing actress
Gina Carano for her inflammatory social media posts. Here, courts rejected the
employers’ motions to dismiss, and litigation proceeds. Such arguments from employers are
proliferating. In Colorado, a school-employer has argued for a right to exclude
employees who do not share their “Christian worldview.” In litigation against the
Pregnant Workers’ Fairness Act, large Catholic social service employers say
that employer associational freedom is under threat from a rule that employers
refrain from discrimination related to abortion. Employers, however, are not akin
to voluntary membership groups (James D. Nelson, Charlotte Garden, and I make
these arguments and more in a new article). First, paid labor distributes
material benefits necessary for survival, whereas volunteers do not expect
compensation and, therefore, retain independence from the organization for
means of survival. Second, members of membership organizations maintain high
degrees of freedom and equality, even as managers of firms control employees.
Third, membership organizations gather individuals based on common values,
characteristics, or concerns. Employment instead brings together diverse
populations. These three factors—coercion,
control, and diversity—should shape courts’ approach to employer claims to
expressive association. As a general principle, the employment relationship is
not meaningfully expressive (there may be exceptions but they are just that).
Under the employer prerogative of control, employees and management do not
“join together to speak” as members do in voluntary associations. Instead,
workers are ordered to voice the employer’s message. Many others do not speak
at all. And because employees are coerced into work (at least in the sense of
financial need), their decision to take a job doesn’t say that they
individually endorse their employer’s positions. In those rare cases where
employer-employee relations constitute expressive association, the inclusion of
any particular employee usually won’t amount to a significant burden on
organizational speech. Day-to-day (or even minute-to-minute) control of work
means that employers can micromanage what employees do and say while doing their
jobs. Control also helps police a border between speech attributable to an
employer and speech belonging to individuals. (Of course, mileage will vary
depending on the individual’s organizational role as leader, policymaker, etc).
The expectation of workplace diversity in turn means employees aren’t expected
to match ideologies, personal identities, family configurations, and religious
views. Finally, rejection of employer
claims to expressive association is generally justified by their role in the
economy and relationship to workers. And there’s reason to think separating
work from personal life is better for associational freedom writ large. It
leaves people free to form genuine voluntary associations to pursue their own values
away from their bosses. Courts can and should justify the
rejection of expressive association in employment. But increasingly they do
not. And where they do, the results may fall into a familiar institutional
First Amendment pattern—favoring conservative and Christian entities over
others. These decisions point to ongoing
shifts in First Amendment. First, we see a troubling tendency to paint
discriminatory conduct as speech. Typical is New Hope Family Services v. Poole, where the Second Circuit
confronted claims from a Christian foster and adoption agency that New York’s
antidiscrimination law violated its rights to speech and expressive
association. The core of the agency’s objection was to “[i]ncluding unmarried
or same- sex couples” in its adoption and foster programs—a regulation of its
conduct. But the Second Circuit found plausible that antidiscrimination law “is
necessarily compelling New Hope to engage in the speech required for that
conduct—speech with which New Hope does not agree.” The free speech analysis
then worked in tandem with expressive association. The articulation of a desire
to discriminate transformed a workplace into an expressive association eligible
for constitutional protection of its hiring. The cases I discuss here pre-date
303 Creative LLC v. Elenis but they may predict its future direction. In
303 Creative, the Supreme Court insisted that the application of a
public accommodations law to a website designer regulated “pure speech.” But it
also seemed to accept that compliance with antidiscrimination law inevitably
burdens the message of those who would rather discriminate—a notion reflected in
the employer association cases. 303 Creative, moreover, describes
antidiscrimination law as aiming to eliminate views and prescribe what shall be
offensive. The act of discrimination becomes speech, and its regulation intentional
targeting of disfavored speech. Second, employer expressive
association cases reveal the increasing irrelevance of institutional context
for First Amendment doctrine. The failure to distinguish work from voluntary
groups is consistent with the Court’s erasure of lines between public and
private, secular and religious, and non-profit and for-profit in free speech
and free exercise cases. Consider, for example, that in 303 Creative LLC v.
Elenis, the majority chided the dissent for thinking that constitutional
precedent endorsed limits on First Amendment protection for commercial or
for-profit entities. These cases meld doctrines once separated
into speech, association, and religion. In Our Lady’s Inn v. City of St.
Louis, for example, the district court mixed—or perhaps combined—the
plaintiffs’ association and free exercise claims. Its opinion reads: “Applying
the principles of Dale, the Court finds that Our Lady’s Inn is an
expressive association entitled to protection under the free-exercise clause.”176
In Darren Patterson Christian Academy v. Roy, the court’s analysis of
expressive association came in a section entitled “religion clause claims.”177
Both courts authorized religious employers to discriminate against not only
ministers, but all employees. Third and finally, the religious
identity of litigants has enabled courts to advance speech doctrines toward
deregulatory ends. In her recent work, Kate Redburn argues that speech became the
preferred “constitutional vehicle for the right to discriminate on religious
grounds in places of public accommodation”; “Christian conservative cause
lawyers were not dupes of their libertarian peers” but rather employed speech
toward goals of religion. The growth of expressive association claims suggests
that Christian conservative litigation shops—primarily, the Alliance Defending
Freedom—are using speech in similar ways for religious employers. Courts and litigants are able to
toggle between religion, speech, and association so as to favor right-wing
conservative actors. Consider that upon remand from the Second Circuit in New
Hope, the district court avoided the association claim by concluding that
antidiscrimination law unconstitutionally compelled speech from the adoption
agency—having to place children with gay or unmarried couples would require
some speech. Where entire Catholic archdioceses argued that all employees fall
into their expressive association, courts of appeals stretched the ministerial
exception beyond any defensible bounds to side with religious litigants and avoid
Supreme Court review. The upshot in these cases is the same. The employer wins—so
long as it asserts religion paired with speech. And so, while speech and
association doctrines are meant to apply impartially to secular and religious,
woke and anti-woke alike, they seem unlikely to do so. Courts instead may defer
to conservative Christian employers across First
Amendment contexts.
The “pro-business” Supreme Court may be eclipsed by the “pro-religion” Court. [This piece draws in large
measure on Expressive Association at Work, Mich. L. Rev. (forthcoming
2026) (with James D. Nelson and Charlotte Garden) and The Return of Boy Scouts of America
v. Dale, 68 St.
Louis U. L.J. 803 (2024).] Elizabeth Sepper is Professor, University of Texas
at Austin School of Law. You can reach her by e-mail at elizabeth.sepper@law.utexas.edu.
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