The first amendment and the government workplace: Has the constitution fallen down on the job?

Abstract

This article examines the changes in First Amendment protection afforded public employee speech after the landmark 1968 Supreme Court decision in Pickering v. Board of Education and the assumptions about organizational communication which undergird those changes. After examining over 200 appellate cases since Pickering with specific focus on the interests at stake, the means by which the courts are attempting to balance the competing interests, and the standards which an employee must meet to prove that she/he was punished in retaliation for speech, the author concludes that the use of the ad hoc balancing approach leads to inconsistencies and that free speech in public organizations is unnecessarily more limited than free speech in society at large.