Law Commons^™

“A Kind Of Continuing Dialogue”: Reexamining The Audience’S Role In Exempting Academic Freedom From Garcetti’S Employee Speech Doctrine, Michael A. Sloman

Georgia Law Review

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Garcetti v. Ceballos
put further restraints on public employee speech by exempting
from First Amendment protection speech made pursuant to the
“official duties” of public employees. This limitation, if applied
to the speech of college professors, would constrain their
academic freedom of instruction and scholarship by permitting
overbearing institutional oversight. This constraint would be
detrimental not only to the employed professors, but also to
their students and the post-secondary educational system as a
whole. Courts should not apply Garcetti to academic freedom
in the post-secondary education context, and they should avoid
further limitations on …