Jack Balkin has an extended post explaining that the Court’s public-employee-speech doctrine, culminating in this morning’s decision in Ceballos, has strayed very far from the objectives the Court sought to advance in Pickering, to the point where it’s most protective of employee speech in the cases where it’s least important to public discourse, and not very helpful at all in cases where public employees could add real value to such discourse. Jack writes:
After Ceballos, employees who do know what they are talking about will retain First Amendment protection only if they make their complaints publicly without going through internal grievance procedures. Although the Court suggests that its decision will encourage the creation and use of such internal procedures, it will probably not have that effect. Note that if employees have obligations to settle disputes and make complaints within internal grievance procedures, then they are doing something that is within their job description when they make complaints and so they have no First Amendment protections in what they say. Hence employees will have incentives not to use such procedures but to speak only in public if they want First Amendment protections (note that if they speak both privately and publicly, they can be fired for their private speech). However, if they speak only publicly, they essentially forfeit their ability to stay in their jobs, first because they become pariahs, and second, because they have refused to use the employer’s internal mechanisms for complaint (mechanisms which, if they used them, would eliminate their First Amendment rights). In short, whatever they do, they are pretty much screwed. So the effect of the Court’s decision is to create very strong incentives against whistleblowing of any kind. (Another possible result of the case is that employees will have incentives to speak anonymously or leak information to reporters and hope that the reporters don’t have to reveal their sources).I am sympathetic to the Court’s desire to reduce the burden of ad hoc balancing by creating a bright line rule of no protection. But in this case, the Court’s decision doesn’t really create a bright line rule, because the boundaries of what is within an employee’s job description may turn out to be quite contestable, and will be contested in future cases. Perhaps more important, the Court resolves the original tension in its doctrine by creating a rule that completely undermines the doctrine’s information policy goals.
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