Source: https://isi.org/intercollegiate-review/does-the-first-amendment-protect-incendiary-tweets/
Timestamp: 2019-04-22 12:16:22+00:00

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Does the First Amendment Protect Incendiary Tweets?
The controversy over California State University at Fresno creative writing professor Randa Jarrar’s incendiary tweets about the recently departed former First Lady Barbara Bush has given me an unexpected opportunity: the chance to put an assignment from my first year of law school to good use.
So I thought it couldn’t hurt to tackle the case of the acid-tongued Professor Jarrar from a lawyer’s perspective. As a matter of binding judicial precedent, was her posthumous anti-Bush bombshell protected by the First Amendment? In a nutshell: yes, it is…but a fifty-year-old Supreme Court case leaves open the slightest of possibilities that a court could rule the other way—however wrongheaded such a ruling would be.
Yet in Garcetti, the court also acknowledged that this freedom isn’t completely unlimited, since public employee speech can sometimes “contravene governmental policies or impair the proper performance of governmental functions.” In other words, government agencies, like private ones, need to be able to regulate and control their employees’ speech on the job in order to accomplish their institutional missions successfully.
Therefore, the court’s majority opinion in Garcetti added an extra prong to the test—first established in the 1968 case of Pickering v. Board of Education—that courts previously used to determine whether a government employee’s speech is protected by the First Amendment. A court hearing a public employee free speech case must first determine whether the employee was speaking as a citizen or “pursuant to their official duties” (the criterion added by Garcetti). The court must then consider whether the employee was addressing a matter of public concern (the factor originally established by Pickering).
If the answer to either of these questions is no, then the court will rule that the speech in controversy was not protected by the First Amendment and will uphold the penalty. There, the case will end.
The Garcetti decision also preserved the third and final prong of the Pickering analysis. In cases where the employees were (a) speaking as private citizens and (b) addressing matters of public concern, courts must “arrive at a balance between the interests of the [employee], as a citizen, in commenting upon matters of public concern and the interest of the State, as an employer, in promoting the efficiency of the public services it performs through its employees.” This “Pickering balancing test” (if you’ll forgive the legalese) is, of course, the trickiest and most potentially subjective part of the inquiry.
So was Randa Jarrar speaking as a citizen when she put Barbara Bush on blast, or was she speaking as a creative writing professor? The president of the university, Joseph I. Castro, answered this question up front, in a public statement tweeted in the teeth of the firestorm: “Her statements were made as a private citizen, not as a representative of Fresno State.” This conclusion makes sense, since Jarrar made the inflammatory remarks in a series of tweets, not during class time or office hours, not while communicating with students, and not in the process of fulfilling any of her other employment duties. So Professor Jarrar should easily pass the first part of the test.
Was she addressing a matter of public concern? This question practically answers itself. Of course the issue of whether a former First Lady “was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal” (as Jarrar originally tweeted) is a matter of public concern, regardless of whether one agrees with this vitriolic indictment of the late Mrs. Bush. The personal character and public policy influence—such as it was—of a political figure like the wife of the president of the United States obviously “relat[es] to [a] matter of political, social, or other concern to the community,” which is how the Supreme Court defined matters of public concern in Connick v. Myers.
The Connick Court also provided some [somewhat] helpful guidance for future generations of judges, lawyers, and stressed-out law students: “Whether an employee’s speech addresses a matter of public concern must be determined by the content, form, and context of a given statement, as revealed by the whole record.” The fact that Professor Jarrar chose to speak ill of the deceased former First Lady on a public platform like Twitter, rather than in the classroom or any other far more limited academic forum, reinforces the conclusion that she was indeed tackling an issue of public concern.
If things do come to that sorry pass, how will the court probably rule in light of the final prong of the government-employee free speech inquiry: the Pickering balancing test? How could a court strike a proper balance between Randa Jarrar’s interest in being free to speak on matters of public concern—however scurrilously—and the Fresno State administration’s interest in educating its students efficiently and effectively?
In theory, a case could be made that the Fresno State administration, and not Professor Jarrar, should pass the balancing test. I wouldn’t put it entirely past some lower courts to hold that public universities have a legitimate need to discipline faculty members for hurling such vituperative condemnations at a just-deceased figure like a former First Lady of the United States. A judge might conclude that the public outrage (much of it hypocritical—more on that later) triggered by Jarrar’s tweets risks fomenting disharmony both on and off campus that could disrupt classroom teaching and hamper both the university’s and Jarrar’s own efforts to educate the student body.
the desire to maintain a sedate academic environment, to avoid the discomfort and unpleasantness that always accompany an unpopular viewpoint, is not an interest sufficiently compelling, however, to justify limitations on a teacher’s freedom to express himself on political issues in vigorous, argumentative, unmeasured, and even distinctly unpleasant terms. Only where expressive behavior involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others may it be regulated by the state. Self-restraint and respect for all opinions, however desirable and necessary in strictly scholarly writing and discussion, cannot be demanded on pain of dismissal once the professor crosses the concededly fine line from academic instruction as a teacher to political agitation as a citizen—even on the campus itself.
Similarly, seven years later, in the case of Peacock v. Duval, the same Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals stated: “Although we recognize the necessity for the efficient functioning of a public university, such efficiency cannot be purchased at the expense of stifling free and unhindered debate on fundamental educational issues.” Although that case concerned a medical school professor who criticized the way the school allocated payments for services delivered by its clinical departments, the court still recognized the indispensability of free speech in academia, even in cases where the speaker expresses himself in an offensive manner. Other similar cases abound, from 2001’s Bauer v. Sampson and Hardy v. Jefferson Community College, to 1999’s Mendocino Environmental Center v. Mendocino County, all the way back to 1957’s Sweezy v. New Hampshire (the last two of which noted that even mere investigations by government institutions into individuals’ exercise of their free speech rights can violate the First Amendment).
As for the U.S. Supreme Court, I think it highly unlikely that it would ultimately side with Fresno State’s administration if a lawsuit on this matter should reach the nation’s highest bench. In the 2011 case of Snyder v. Phelps, the court ruled in favor of the vile Westboro Baptist Church’s right to picket outside the funerals of American soldiers killed in combat. Just last year, in the case of Matal v. Tam, the court unanimously reaffirmed its previous holdings that there is no “hate speech exception” to the First Amendment right to free speech.
Courts have been entirely right to rule accordingly, because institutionalizing the heckler’s veto would endanger everyone’s free speech rights in the end. No one political worldview has a monopoly on offensiveness; every ideology or movement encompasses at least some viewpoints that are unpopular enough with their detractors to be considered intolerable by the latter. To leave public university administrations or any other government institutions free to punish any utterance that causes a public outcry would make a great deal of speech across the whole political spectrum vulnerable to censorship. Liberals, conservatives, libertarians, socialists, centrists—all would potentially be fair game for muzzling by the authorities, so long as enough of a given speaker’s critics were willing to react with outrage.
Indeed, the case of Randa Jarrar is instructive partly because of the political orientation of Jarrar herself: an Arab-American writer and professor known for her stridently left-wing opinions on political and social issues. The fact that someone of her background is facing a career-threatening investigation for hurling calumnies at a conservative public figure like Barbara Bush should serve as a warning to all modern left-liberal advocates of ideas such as prohibiting hate speech. Ultimately, such arguments for censorship are always hypocritical; their proponents never want—or expect—their own viewpoints, or those with which they sympathize, to be silenced. It’s the “Free speech for me, but not for thee” tendency decried by the late writer Nat Hentoff at its finest. Unfortunately, it seems not to occur to these censorship apologists that two—indeed, many—can play at that game, and that their own efforts can all too easily backfire on them.
Aside from its First Amendment implications, the moral of the sorry story of Randa Jarrar is that no single political movement has the corner on the censorship market. The impulse to muzzle speech one doesn’t like straddles the ideological spectrum, with the result that those who seek to dish it out can just as easily end up eating it at any time—and vice versa. The Jarrar controversy deserves to go down in history as a cautionary tale not only of the commonly known dangers of censorship but also of its potential to blow up in its own advocates’ faces.
Born in Toronto, Canada and raised in Montreal, Akil Alleyne is a 2008 graduate of Princeton University and a 2013 graduate of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City, where his major areas of study were constitutional and international law. He most recently worked for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a nonprofit organization that advocates for the civil liberties of free speech, freedom of religion and association, and due process.
Chances are you’ve read something by Karl Marx or Friedrich Engels (and it’s good you did). Maybe you’ve even read Foucault or Chomsky. But what about leading thinkers on the right?

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