Law Commons^™

The Connick/Garcetti Split: Is Public Employee Association A Matter Of Public Concern?, Austin J. Wishart

University of Cincinnati Law Review

No abstract provided.

Compelled Unionism In The Private Sector After Janus: Why Unions Should Not Profit From Dissenting Employees, Giovanna Bonafede

Catholic University Law Review

This Note examines the impact of the 2018 landmark labor law case Janus v. AFSCME. Janus held it unconstitutional under the First Amendment to require public sector employees to pay fees to a union to which they are not a member. The Supreme Court based their decision on the idea that compelling public employees to subsidize union speech to which they disagreed violated their free speech rights. The author argues that the Court’s holding in Janus should be extended to protect the free speech rights of private sector employees through a finding of state action in the private unionized …

Political Equality And First Amendment Challenges To Labor Law, Luke Taylor

University of Cincinnati Law Review

This Article conceptualizes a novel basis for defending laws that strengthen labor unions from First Amendment challenge: the argument that these laws are adequately tailored to advancing a compelling state interest in reducing economic inequality’s transmission into political inequality. The Article makes two principal contributions. First, it updates criticisms of the Supreme Court’s campaign finance decisions’ rejection of any compelling interest sounding in political equality. The Article does so by bringing recent constitutional scholarship to bear on that criticism and by explaining how recent improvements in social scientists’ ability to track different economic brackets’ political influence call for the Court …

Qualified Immunity: 1983 Litigation In The Public Employment Context, Erwin Chemerinsky

Erwin Chemerinsky

No abstract provided.

An Overview Of The October 2006 Supreme Court Term, Erwin Chemerinsky

Erwin Chemerinsky

No abstract provided.

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

Randy J Kozel

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 …

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, …

The Nlrb's Restrictions On The Employer's Right Of Free Speech, D. Richard Froelke

Akron Law Review

In fiscal year 1968 more than a half million employees cast ballots in NLRB-conducted representation elections. Over the years more than twenty-five million employees have cast ballots in NLRB-supervised elections. Consequently, it seems worthwhile to review, in the light of the First Amendment, the NLRB's attempt to regulate the conduct of elections in which employees choose whether to become organized.

Bad Math: How Non-Union Employees Are Unconstitutionally Compelled To Subsidize Political Speech, Shirley V. Svorny, Melanie S. Williams

Melanie S. Williams

Employees’ right to organize and be represented by unions is in tension with the right of other employees not to join organizations as a condition of employment. Current law permits unions to assess agency fees from represented non-members, reflecting the cost of representational activities (for example, contract negotiation). Unions may not, however, assess non-members for the cost of political activities, since this would infringe on the constitutional rights of such employees by requiring them to subsidize political speech. The method of calculating agency fees, however, has been almost uniformly mishandled, resulting in overcharging non-union members. In this paper, we examine …

Qualified Immunity: 1983 Litigation In The Public Employment Context, Erwin Chemerinsky

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

An Overview Of The October 2006 Supreme Court Term, Erwin Chemerinsky

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Whistleblowing And Free Speech: Garcetti's Early Progeny And Shrinking Constitutional Rights Of Public Employees, J. Michael Mcguinness

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

All For One, And One For All-Comers! University Nondiscrimination Policies In Light Of Hosanna-Tabor And The Ministerial Exception, Zach Tafoya

Pepperdine Law Review

In light of the more recent Hosanna-Tabor decision, this Comment seeks to answer these questions by extending the reasoning behind the ministerial exception to the university context in order to build a foundation upon which a future exception can be built to ensure that religious student groups are sufficiently free to choose their own leaders. Part II sets forth a brief history of the ministerial exception and its application in the circuit courts. Part III addresses two recent Supreme Court cases, Martinez and Hosanna-Tabor, and their practical effect on religious liberty, as well as the public’s perception of both cases. …

Facebook Is Not Your Friend: Protecting A Private Employee's Expectation Of Privacy In Social Networking Content In The Twenty-First Century Workplace, Cara Magatelli

The Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship & the Law

This Comment explores the implications SNS postings have on private employers concerning the off-duty, non-work related conduct of their employees. This argument recognizes that an employee is entitled to engage in whatever legal off-duty conduct he chooses, so long as the behavior does not damage his employer's legitimate business interests. An employer should not be able to use information gleaned from an employee's SNS postings, unrelated to an employer's business interests, to punish an employee for her choices outside the work place. Disciplining or terminating an employee for his off-duty lifestyle choices permits the morals and standards of the employer …

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 …

Gay Talk: Protecting Free Speech For Public School Teachers, Stephen J. Elkind, Peter D. Kauffman

Stephen J Elkind

In Garcetti v. Ceballos, the Supreme Court held that public employees are not entitled to free speech when speaking “pursuant to their official duties.” In most situations, this strips teachers of First Amendment protection when they discuss controversial subjects, such as homosexuality, with their students. To ensure their classrooms are tolerant and accepting environments for homosexual and questioning youth, teachers need free speech protection against adverse employment action their schools might take. The Garcetti Court, acknowledging that “expression related to academic scholarship and classroom instruction implicates” unique constitutional concerns, explicitly left open whether its decision applied in the education …

Mirror, Mirror On The Wall, Who Are You To Say Who Is Fairest Of Them All?, Ashley R. Brown

Ashley R Brown

No abstract provided.

Unions, Corporations, And The First Amendment: A Response To Professors Fisk And Chemerinsky, Todd E. Pettys

Todd E. Pettys

In this response to Professor Fisk and Chemerinsky’s critique of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Knox v. SEIU Local 1000, I make two arguments. First, I challenge the premise of shareholder-employee equivalency that undergirds key portions of Fisk and Chemerinsky’s analysis. Second, I contest the claim that Knox contributes to incoherence in the Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence. Specifically, I challenge Fisk and Chemerinsky’s argument that Knox is difficult to reconcile with the Court’s leading precedents on the speech rights of government employees, and I raise doubts about their reading of the Court’s compelled-speech cases involving complaints that one’s resources are …

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 …

Neoformalism And The Reemergence Of The Right-Privilege Distinction In Public Employment Law, Paul M. Secunda

San Diego Law Review

The First Amendment speech rights of public employees, which have traditionally enjoyed protection under the doctrine of unconstitutional conditions, have suddenly diminished in recent years. At one time developed to shut the door on the infamous privilege/rights distinction, the unconstitutional conditions doctrine has now been increasingly used to rob these employees of their constitutional rights.

Three interrelated developments explain this state of affairs. First, a jurisprudential school of thought--the "subsidy school"--has significantly undermined the vitality of the unconstitutional conditions doctrine through its largely successful sparring with an alternative school of thought, the "penalty school." Second, although initially developed in the …

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.

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.

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 …

On Balancing Scales, Kaleidoscopes, And The Blurred Limits Of Academic Freedom, Harry F. Tepker Jr., Joseph Harroz Jr.

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

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.

The First Amendment And Nonpicketing Labor Publicity Under Section 8(B)(4)(Ii)(B) Of The National Labor Relations Act, Lee Goldman

Vanderbilt Law Review

This Article attempts to provide the appropriate constitutional analysis of restrictions on nonpicketing labor publicity. Part II describes the relevant statute and illustrative cases, including the Supreme Court's DeBartolo decision, that have raised but not resolved the first amendment issues concerning nonpicketing labor publicity. The cases focus attention on two restrictions the courts have imposed on nonpicketing labor publicity-the "producer-distributor" and the "for the purpose of" requirements. Part III analyzes the protected status of the nonpicketing labor speech by comparing nonpicketing labor publicity with labor picketing and commercial speech-two areas that bear superficial similarity to nonpicketing labor publicity and that …

Current State Action Theories, The Jackson Nexus Requirement, And Employee Discharges By Semi-Public And State-Aided Institutions, Thomas R. Mccoy

Vanderbilt Law Review

The purpose of this Article has been to reestablish the continued vitality of the several branches of the state action doctrine in the face of recent decisions that have strained noticeably to avoid implementation of one or more elements of the doctrine, often by an illogical insistence on the application of the Jackson nexus requirement. At least in the employment discharge cases, the regular findings of no state action should not be read as casting doubt upon the continued viability of the various elements of state action doctrine, much less as indications that all elements except state-action-by-state-regulation are so obviously …

Book Reviews, Reginald C. Harmon (Reviewer), A. B. Butts (Reviewer), Rollin M. Perkins (Reviewer), Stanley D. Rose (Reviewer), Charles H. Livengood, Jr. (Reviewer), Keith W. Blinn (Reviewer)

Vanderbilt Law Review

Military Justice under the Uniform Code

By James Snedeker

Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1953. $15.00.

reviewer: Reginald C. Harmon

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Conscription of Conscience

By Mulford Q. Sibley and Philip E. Jacob

Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1952. Pp. x, 580. $6.50.

reviewer: A. B. Butts

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Theft, Law and Society

By Jerome Hall

Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc. Second Edition, 1952. Pp. xxiv, 398. $10.00.

reviewer: Rollin M. Perkins

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Freedom of the Press in England 1476-1776

By Fredrick S. Siebert

Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1952. Pp. xiv, 411. $7.50.

reviewer: Stanley D. Rose

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Wage-Hour Law: Coverage

By Heiman …