Law Commons^™

Defamation And The Government Employee: Redefining Who Constitutes A Public Official, Jeffrey Omar Usman

Law Faculty Scholarship

This Article embraces neither the narrow nor broad conceptualization of a public official employed currently by state and lower federal courts but instead suggests revisiting the Rosenblatt formulation and the one clear limitation set forth by Hutchinson that whatever the scope of public officialdom may be “it cannot be thought to include all public employees.” Though not all speech about government employees should be deemed to be related to their official capacity, all government employees should be considered public officials, and speech related to their official conduct should be safeguarded by the actual malice standard. To explain and support this …