Law Commons^™

Politics At Work After Citizens United, Ruben J. Garcia

Scholarly Works

There are seismic changes going on in the political system. The United States Supreme Court has constitutionalized the concentration of political power in the "one percent" in several recent decisions, including Citizens United v. FEC. At the same time, unions are representing a shrinking share of the workforce, and their political power is also being diminished. In order for unions to recalibrate the balance of political power at all, they must collaborate with grassroots community groups, as they have done in several recent campaigns. There are, however, various legal structures that make coordination between unions and nonunion groups difficult, …

Citizenship At Work: How The Supreme Court Politically Marginalized Public Employees, Ruben J. Garcia

Scholarly Works

Collective bargaining by public sector employees has been the subject of recent heated debates in the state legislatures of Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana. The right of public sector employees to freedom of association, collective bargaining, and the right to participate in politics are among the “citizenship rights” of public employees. In many states, however, the citizenship rights of public employees are under threat both in state legislatures and in the courts. Paradoxically, the ability of public sector employees to change legislation has been hampered over the years by Supreme Court decisions, making it more difficult to organize politically by …

Free Speech And Parity: A Theory Of Public Employee Rights, Randy J. Kozel

Journal Articles

More than four decades have passed since the U.S. Supreme Court revolutionized the First Amendment rights of the public workforce. In the ensuing years the Court has embarked upon an ambitious quest to protect expressive liberties while facilitating orderly and efficient government. Yet it has never articulated an adequate theoretical framework to guide its jurisprudence. This Article suggests a conceptual reorientation of the modern doctrine. The proposal flows naturally from the Court’s rejection of its former view that one who accepts a government job has no constitutional right to complain about its conditions. As a result of that rejection, the …

Speech Of Government Employees, Ann C. Hodges

Law Faculty Publications

For many years, government employment was considered a privilege rather than a right, and, as a result, the government could place restrictions on employee speech that would be unconstitutional if applied to citizens.

Matters Of Public Concern Standard In Free Speech Cases, Ann C. Hodges

Law Faculty Publications

The public concern standard has operated primarily in two categories of free-speech cases: those involving speech by government employees and those involving defamation.

Disciplining Public Employees For Expressive Activity, Ann C. Hodges

Law Faculty Publications

A public employee's right to free speech under the First Amendment is not unlimited and employers have the right to discipline employees for expressive activity under certain circumstances (Pickering v. Board of Education, 391 U.S. 563, 1968). The employer has an interest in ensuring that its etnployees do not under1nine its operations or ll1terfere with acco1nplishment of its objectives. At the same time, employees do not give up their constitutional rights when they accept government employment.

Robust Public Debate: Realizing Free Speech In Workplace Representation Elections, Kate Andrias

Faculty Scholarship

The First Amendment stands as a guarantor of political freedom and as the “guardian of our democracy.” It seeks to expand the vitality of public discourse in order to enable Americans to become aware of the issues before them and to pursue their ends fully and freely. As the Supreme Court wrote in the canonical case of New York Times Co. v . Sullivan, the First Amendment’s function is to create the “uninhibited, robust and wide-open” public debate necessary for the exercise of self-governance.

The Amendment plays a prominent role in the regulation of workplace representation elections, the process …

A Constitutional Right Of Religious Exemption: An Historical Perspective, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

Did late eighteenth-century Americans understand the Free Exercise Clause of the United States Constitution to provide individuals a right of exemption from civil laws to which they had religious objections? Claims of exemption based on the Free Exercise Clause have prompted some of the Supreme Court's most prominent free exercise decisions, and therefore this historical inquiry about a right of exemption may have implications for our constitutional jurisprudence. Even if the Court does not adopt late eighteenth-century ideas about the free exercise of religion, we may, nonetheless, find that the history of such ideas can contribute to our contemporary analysis. …

Title Vii As Censorship: Hostile Environment Harassment And The First Amendment, Kingsley R. Browne

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.