Connick v. Myers
Case Date: 08/25/1983
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Connick v. Myers, 461 U.S. 138 (1983), is a United States Supreme Court decision concerning the First Amendment rights of public employees who speak on matters of possible public concern within the workplace context. It was first brought by Sheila Myers, an Orleans Parish, Louisiana, assistant district attorney (ADA). She had been fired by her superior, District Attorney Harry Connick Sr., when, after receiving a transfer she had fiercely resisted in private conversations with him and his chief assistant district attorney, she distributed a questionnaire to her fellow prosecutors asking about their experience with Connick's management practices. At trial, Judge Jack Gordon of the Eastern District of Louisiana found the firing had been motivated by the questionnaire and was thus an infringement on her right to speak out on matters of public concern as a public employee. After the Fifth Circuit affirmed the verdict, Connick appealed to the Supreme Court.
The justices reversed the lower courts by a 5-4 margin. Justice Byron White wrote for the majority that most of the matters Myers' questionnaire had touched on were of personal, not public, concern and that the action had damaged the harmonious relations necessary for the efficient operation of the district attorney's office. William Brennan argued in dissent that the majority's application of precedent was flawed. He argued that all the matters in the questionnaire were of public concern, and feared a chilling effect on speech by public employees about such matters would result.
The case was the first in a line considering the right of public employees to speak contemporaneously with their employment that had started with Pickering v. Board of Education 15 years earlier in which the Court sided with the employer. It introduced the test of whether the employee's speech had been on matters of public concern to the balancing of employer and employee interest prescribed in the earlier case. The two would guide the Court's interpretation of later cases such as Rankin v. McPherson[1] In the 1990s and 2000s (decade), Waters v. Churchill and Garcetti v. Ceballos, the latter with some similarities to the circumstances of Connick, would further clarify it.
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