The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2006 ruling in Garcetti v. Ceballos has been a “disaster” for the free speech of public employees, Free Speech Center First Amendment expert David L. Hudson Jr. writes in a recent issue of the Mitchell Hamline Law Review.
The decision belongs in the high court’s “hall of shame,” Hudson says, because it “created a categorical rule that public employees have no free speech rights when engaged in official, job-related speech.”
In many cases the effect of Garcetti has been to keep government corruption secret because government workers know they can lose their jobs if they expose it. The result harms not only the public employee whose free-speech rights are chilled, but also the public – which loses valuable information.
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