Paul Secunda has a new paper on SSRN that provides the full story of the famous First Amendment case Pickering v. Board of Education.  Paul interviewed the plaintiff, Marvin Pickering (now in his 70s), and collected other historical records in order to supplement the background information supplied in the United States Supreme Court’s decision.  Pickering was fired from his job as a public school teacher in Lockport, Illinois, in 1964 after he wrote a letter to the editor criticizing the Lockport School Board.  Pickering challenged his dismissal all the way to the Supreme Court and eventually won reinstatement.

In addition to recounting Pickering’s colorful life story and the history of the case that made him famous, Paul’s paper also critically appraises the post-Pickering cases that have pared back the First Amendment rights of public employees.  The paper appears as a chapter in the book First Amendment Law Stories.  An abstract appears after the jump.