04-473 - Garcetti v. Ceballos - Supreme Court of the United States

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Cite as: 547 U. S. ____ (2006)11SOUTER, J., dissentingcase and Rust lies in the terms of the respective employees’jobs and, in particular, the extent to which thoseterms require espousal of a substantive position prescribedby the government in advance. Some public employeesare hired to “promote a particular policy” bybroadcasting a particular message set by the government,but not everyone working for the government, after all, ishired to speak from a government manifesto. See LegalServices Corporation v. Velazquez, 531 U. S. 533, 542(2001). There is no claim or indication that Ceballos washired to perform such a speaking assignment. He waspaid to enforce the law by constitutional action: to exercisethe county government’s prosecutorial power by actinghonestly, competently, and constitutionally. The onlysense in which his position apparently required him tohew to a substantive message was at the relatively abstractpoint of favoring respect for law and its evenhandedenforcement, subjects that are not at the level of controversyin this case and were not in Rust. Unlike the doctorsin Rust, Ceballos was not paid to advance one specificpolicy among those legitimately available, defined by aspecific message or limited by a particular message forbidden.The county government’s interest in his speechcannot therefore be equated with the terms of a specific,prescribed, or forbidden substantive position comparableto the Federal Government’s interest in Rust, and Rust isno authority for the notion that government may exerciseplenary control over every comment made by a publicemployee in doing his job.It is not, of course, that the district attorney lackedinterest of a high order in what Ceballos might say. If hisspeech undercut effective, lawful prosecution, there wouldhave been every reason to rein him in or fire him; a statementthat created needless tension among law enforcementagencies would be a fair subject of concern, and thesame would be true of inaccurate statements or false ones
12 GARCETTI v. CEBALLOSSOUTER, J., dissentingmade in the course of doing his work. But these interestson the government’s part are entirely distinct from anyclaim that Ceballos’s speech was government speech witha preset or proscribed content as exemplified in Rust. Nordid the county petitioners here even make such a claim intheir answer to Ceballos’s complaint, see n. 13, infra.The fallacy of the majority’s reliance on Rosenberger’sunderstanding of Rust doctrine, moreover, portends abloated notion of controllable government speech goingwell beyond the circumstances of this case. Consider thebreadth of the new formulation:“Restricting speech that owes its existence to a publicemployee’s professional responsibilities does not infringeany liberties the employee might have enjoyedas a private citizen. It simply reflects the exercise ofemployer control over what the employer itself hascommissioned or created.” Ante, at 10.This ostensible domain beyond the pale of the FirstAmendment is spacious enough to include even the teachingof a public university professor, and I have to hopethat today’s majority does not mean to imperil FirstAmendment protection of academic freedom in publiccolleges and universities, whose teachers necessarilyspeak and write “pursuant to official duties.” See Grutterv. Bollinger, 539 U. S. 306, 329 (2003) (“We have long recognizedthat, given the important purpose of public educationand the expansive freedoms of speech and thought associatedwith the university environment, universities occupy aspecial niche in our constitutional tradition”); Keyishian v.Board of Regents of Univ. of State of N. Y., 385 U. S. 589,603 (1967) (“Our Nation is deeply committed to safeguardingacademic freedom, which is of transcendent value to allof us and not merely to the teachers concerned. That freedomis therefore a special concern of the First Amendment,which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy
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04-473 - Garcetti v. Ceballos - Supreme Court of the United States

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