Opinion ID: 2770261
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Citizen Speech

Text: That error was compounded by the District Court’s application of an incorrect legal standard to the facts it had improperly found. In determining whether Flora’s job duties encompassed the statements at issue, the District Court identified the relevant legal question as whether Flora’s filing the state court lawsuit and reporting the inadequate progress on expungements “related to” his job duties. (App. at 25.) That approach misapprehends the question posed by Garcetti. The Supreme Court’s opinion in Garcetti sets forth the controlling test for determining whether a public employee’s speech was made incident to his employment duties: “when public employees make statements pursuant to their official duties, the employees are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline.” 547 U.S. at 421. In Garcetti, a deputy district attorney wrote a dispositional memorandum, in which he recommended dismissing a prosecution based on an improper search warrant affidavit. Id. at 414-15. The district court concluded that, because the statements were made pursuant to his official job duties, they were not protected speech. Id. at 415. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed, holding that the speech was inherently a matter of public concern and that it did not unduly disrupt the operations of 15 the District Attorney’s Office. Id. at 415-16. The Supreme Court in turn reversed the court of appeals and held that courts must first inquire as to whether an employee spoke as a citizen or in his role as an employee. Id. at 418. The Court expressly recognized that “the First Amendment protects a public employee’s right, in certain circumstances, to speak as a citizen addressing matters of public concern.” Id. at 417. The Court also stressed that, whether the speech at issue “concern[s] the subject matter of [the speaker’s] employment” is “nondispositive,” because the First Amendment “protects some expressions related to the speaker’s job.” Id. at 421. Instead, the “controlling factor” is whether the statements were “made pursuant to [the speaking employee’s] duties,” that is, whether such utterances were among the things that the employee “was employed to do.” Id. at 421. The Garcetti Court did not advance a framework for defining when an employee speaks pursuant to his official duties. Id. at 424. It did, however, condemn reliance on “excessively broad job descriptions. ” Id. at 424-25. And, it cautioned against a focus on formal job descriptions because “[t]he proper inquiry is a practical one.” Id. We, too, have forgone any attempt to create a comprehensive framework for determining whether speech is made pursuant to an employee’s official job duties. Dougherty, 2014 WL 6600421, at . We have, rather, attempted to “give[] contours to Garcetti’s practical inquiry.” Id. (internal citations omitted). For example, in Foraker v. Chaffich, we declined to extend First Amendment protection when the speech in question was directed “up the chain of command.” 501 F.3d at 241-43 (holding that police officers’ statements concerning hazardous conditions at a firing range were made pursuant to their official duties since they were 16 obligated to report that type of information up the chain of command), abrogated on other grounds by Guarnieri, 131 S. Ct. at 2488. In Gorum v. Sessoms, we held that a professor who spoke on behalf of a student at a disciplinary hearing was speaking pursuant to his official duties when he was a “de facto” advisor to students on disciplinary matters. 561 F.3d at 186. The County and Lawton rely on our statement that a “claimant’s speech might be considered part of his official duties if it relates to ‘special knowledge’ or ‘experience’ acquired through his job,” Foraker, 501 F.3d at 240; accord Gorum, 561 F.3d at 185. They contend that because the speech here relates to special knowledge Flora obtained as Chief Public Defender – in essence that it owes its existence to Flora’s job duties – it was not citizen speech. (Appellees’ Br. at 15-16, 19.) Foraker and Gorum, however, considered how the employee learned of the information as only one non-dispositive factor among many. Indeed, [we have] never applied the “owes its existence to” test ... and for good reason: this nearly all- inclusive standard would eviscerate citizen speech by public employees simply because they learned the information in the course of their employment, which is at odds with the delicate balancing and policy rationales underlying Garcetti. To this end, it bears emphasis that whether an employee’s speech “concern[s] the subject matter of [his] employment” is “nondispositive” under Garcetti. 547 U.S. at 421. This is because 17 the First Amendment necessarily “protects some expressions related to the speaker’s job.” Id. In fact, as the Supreme Court recently reiterated, speech by public employees “holds special value precisely because those employees gain knowledge of matters of public concern through their employment.” Lane, 134 S. Ct. at 2379 (emphasis added) … . Dougherty, 2014 WL 6600421, at . In Lane, the Supreme Court clarified that “[t]he critical question under Garcetti is whether the speech at issue is itself ordinarily within the scope of an employee’s duties, not whether it merely concerns those duties.” 134 S. Ct. at 2379 (emphasis added). The Court held that a public employee could not be terminated for providing to a grand jury truthful, sworn testimony under subpoena, even though the testimony concerned matters related to the employee’s job. Id. at 237879. According to the Court, the term “official responsibilities,” means the responsibilities an employee undertook when he “went to work and performed the tasks he was paid to perform,” which did not, in that case, encompass testifying in legal proceedings. Id. (internal quotation marks omitted). And, the Court cautioned, there is “considerable value” in “encouraging, rather than inhibiting, speech by public employees. For, [they] are often in the best position to know what ails the agencies for which they work.” Id. at 2377 (internal quotation marks omitted). The Court therefore concluded that giving grand jury testimony was not part of that employee’s “ordinary job responsibilities” even though the testimony “relate[d] to [the employee’s] public 18 employment or concern[ed] information learned during that employment.” Id. at 2378 (emphasis added). Further, in Dougherty v. School District of Philadelphia, we had occasion to consider the implications of Lane for a School District employee who was terminated after saying to The Philadelphia Inquirer that the District Superintendent had improperly skirted competitive bidding rules and steered a lucrative contract to a personal acquaintance. 2014 WL 6600421 at . We ruled that the employee spoke as a citizen rather than pursuant to his official duties, even though he oversaw the school district’s procurement program and learned of the alleged misconduct in that role. Id. at -7. We further decided that, because the employee’s “routine job responsibilities” did not include reporting misconduct to the press or to the school board, his speech was not within the scope of his employment “merely because the subject matter of the speech concern[ed] or relate[d] to those duties.” Id. at , . While it was not necessary to our conclusion, we noted that “Lane may broaden Garcetti’s holding by including ‘ordinary’ as a modifier to the scope of an employee’s job duties.” Id. at . Here, the District Court identified the relevant question as whether Flora’s actions “related to” his job duties. (App. at 26.) It then held that, because Flora’s statements did “relate[]” to his role as the Chief Public Defender, they were not citizen speech and were unprotected. (App. at 26-29.) In thus using the “related to” standard, the District Court did not apply the correct test under Garcetti, as Lane has made clear. Lane, 134 S. Ct. at 2379 (“Garcetti said nothing about speech that simply relates to public employment or concerns information learned in the course of public employment.”). 19 In particular, the Supreme Court in Garcetti said that “[t]he First Amendment protects some expressions related to the speaker’s job.” Garcetti, 547 U.S. at 421 (emphasis added). The decision to dismiss Flora’s complaint is thus at odds with controlling precedent. While the District Court did not have the benefit of Lane and Dougherty when it ruled, Garcetti alone should have steered it away from applying the “related to” standard. With the further light that Lane and Dougherty provide, the proper framing of the question is whether the filing of the state court funding suit and the reporting of the failure to finish the expungements were within Flora’s ordinary job duties as the Chief Public Defender, not whether they concerned or were related to those duties. Lane, 134 S. Ct. at 2379. Because the District Court’s decision rests on an errant reading of Garcetti and is at odds with Lane and Dougherty, it cannot stand. We need not decide whether Lane modified or merely clarified Garcetti.11 Because Lane now controls, 11 Lane introduced the word “ordinary” to modify “job duties” in the First Amendment retaliation test. Some courts have speculated whether this new adjective signals a shift in the law that broadens the scope of First Amendment protection for public employees. See, e.g., Mpoy v. Rhee, 758 F.3d 285, 295 (D.C. Cir. 2014) (“In particular, the use of the adjective ordinary – which the court repeated nine times – could signal a narrowing of the realm of employee speech left unprotected by Garcetti. Neither Garcetti nor any other previous Supreme Court case had added ordinary as a qualifier.”); Hagan v. City of New York, ___ F. Supp. 2d ___, No. 13-1108, 2014 WL 4058067, at  (S.D.N.Y. Aug. 15, 2014) (“After Lane, the focus is on her ordinary job 20 cf. Perez v. Dana Corp., Parish Frame Div., 718 F.2d 581, 584 (3d Cir. 1983) (“As a general rule an appellate court must apply the law in effect at the time it renders its decision.”), the responsibility of a district court in evaluating whether a public employee’s speech was made as a private citizen is to ask whether the speech at issue was “outside the scope of his ordinary job responsibilities.” Id. at 2378.