{"id":10347,"date":"2010-06-03T09:22:28","date_gmt":"2010-06-03T14:22:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/?p=10347"},"modified":"2010-06-03T09:22:28","modified_gmt":"2010-06-03T14:22:28","slug":"pickering-a-fight-with-the-wrong-guy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/2010\/06\/pickering-a-fight-with-the-wrong-guy\/","title":{"rendered":"Pickering a Fight with the Wrong Guy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Secunda<\/a>\u00a0has a new paper on SSRN<\/a>\u00a0that provides the full story of the famous First Amendment case Pickering v. Board of Education.<\/em>\u00a0 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\u00a0Supreme Court’s decision.\u00a0 Pickering was fired from his job as a public school teacher in Lockport, Illinois,\u00a0in 1964 after he wrote a letter to the editor criticizing the Lockport School Board.\u00a0 Pickering challenged his dismissal all the way to the Supreme Court and eventually won reinstatement.<\/p>\n

In addition to recounting Pickering’s colorful life story and the history of the case that made him famous, Paul’s\u00a0paper also critically appraises the\u00a0post-Pickering\u00a0<\/em>cases that have pared back the First Amendment rights of public employees.\u00a0 The paper appears as a chapter\u00a0in\u00a0the book\u00a0First Amendment Law Stories.\u00a0 <\/em>An abstract appears after the jump.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

The story of Pickering v. Bd. of Education<\/em>, a foundational case in public employment law, prominently foreshadows more generally the coming prominence of the doctrine of unconstitutional conditions in constitutional law. Under that doctrine, the Supreme Court limits a government actor, like a government employer, from being able to condition governmental benefits, like public employment, on the basis of individuals forfeiting their constitutional rights. It would thus seem to follow that a public employee should not have to sacrifice constitutionally-protected rights in order to enjoy the benefits and privileges of public employment. Yet, today, that is far from the actual case.<\/p>\n

So why have First Amendment public employee speech rights, which have traditionally enjoyed protection under the doctrine of unconstitutional conditions, suddenly diminished in recent years? I want to suggest in this contribution to First Amendment Law Stories that a certain jurisprudential school of thought \u2013 the \u201csubsidy school\u201d \u2013 has significantly undermined the vitality of the unconstitutional conditions doctrine through its largely successful sparring with an alternative school of thought, the \u201cpenalty school.\u201d Under the subsidy school of thought, in contexts as different as abortion funding to the provision of tax exemptions, the unconstitutional conditions doctrine has become largely toothless, as government actors can simply compel a given result by saying they are doing nothing but subsidizing (or not subsidizing) a right a citizen or public employee already has under the Constitution.<\/p>\n

In order to more concretely illustrate the genesis of the unconstitutional conditions doctrine, and its recent distortions, this Chapter returns to an in-depth exploration of the case that started it all: Pickering v. Bd. of Education<\/em>. Although the Court decided this case in Marvin Pickering\u2019s favor, the resulting framework has, over the years, been interpreted by the Supreme Court in a manner that significantly limits public employee free speech rights.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Secunda\u00a0has a new paper on SSRN\u00a0that provides the full story of the famous First Amendment case Pickering v. Board of Education.\u00a0 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\u00a0Supreme Court’s decision.\u00a0 Pickering was fired from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ocean_post_layout":"","ocean_both_sidebars_style":"","ocean_both_sidebars_content_width":0,"ocean_both_sidebars_sidebars_width":0,"ocean_sidebar":"","ocean_second_sidebar":"","ocean_disable_margins":"enable","ocean_add_body_class":"","ocean_shortcode_before_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_after_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_before_header":"","ocean_shortcode_after_header":"","ocean_has_shortcode":"","ocean_shortcode_after_title":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_bottom":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_bottom":"","ocean_display_top_bar":"default","ocean_display_header":"default","ocean_header_style":"","ocean_center_header_left_menu":"","ocean_custom_header_template":"","ocean_custom_logo":0,"ocean_custom_retina_logo":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_height":0,"ocean_header_custom_menu":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_family":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_subset":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_size":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_unit":"px","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_line_height":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_unit":"","ocean_menu_typo_spacing":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_unit":"","ocean_menu_link_color":"","ocean_menu_link_color_hover":"","ocean_menu_link_color_active":"","ocean_menu_link_background":"","ocean_menu_link_hover_background":"","ocean_menu_link_active_background":"","ocean_menu_social_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_links_color":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_color":"","ocean_disable_title":"default","ocean_disable_heading":"default","ocean_post_title":"","ocean_post_subheading":"","ocean_post_title_style":"","ocean_post_title_background_color":"","ocean_post_title_background":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_image_position":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_attachment":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_repeat":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_size":"","ocean_post_title_height":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay":0.5,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay_color":"","ocean_disable_breadcrumbs":"default","ocean_breadcrumbs_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_separator_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_hover_color":"","ocean_display_footer_widgets":"default","ocean_display_footer_bottom":"default","ocean_custom_footer_template":"","ocean_post_oembed":"","ocean_post_self_hosted_media":"","ocean_post_video_embed":"","ocean_link_format":"","ocean_link_format_target":"self","ocean_quote_format":"","ocean_quote_format_link":"post","ocean_gallery_link_images":"on","ocean_gallery_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[67,33,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-amendment","category-labor-employment-law","category-legal-scholarship","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10347\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}