Opinion ID: 2733039
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Speech as a Citizen After Garcetti

Text: Neither the parties nor the district court paints an accurate picture of “the landscape of [Fifth] Circuit precedent” at the time of the Defendants’ actions. Lane, 134 S. Ct. at 2382. The Defendants argue that our holding in Morgan v. Swanson, 659 F.3d 359 (5th Cir. 2011) (en banc), should apply with equal force to this case. In Morgan, the en banc court addressed a student’s First Amendment claim against educators relating to candy canes with religious references at school—invoking the balance between free speech rights and the Establishment Clause. See 659 F.3d at 379–82. The court granted the school officials qualified immunity because the general state of the law in this area is abstruse, complicated, and subject to great debate among jurists. At the time of the incidents in question, neither a single “controlling authority” nor a “robust consensus of persuasive authority” had held that the First Amendment prohibits school principals from restricting the distribution of written religious materials in public elementary schools. Id. at 382. Despite reciting the Morgan court’s conclusion, the Defendants do not explain how the law in the present case presents similar difficulties. Cutler insists that the district court correctly stated the clearly established law. Yet, the district court relies on a single case for establishing a clearly established right. See Cutler v. Pattillo, No. 2:11-CV-00447, 2013 WL 2543059, at  (E.D. Tex. June 10, 2013) (“[I]t was clearly established law that taking adverse-employment action against an employee for political reasons violates the First Amendment.” (citing Correa v. Fischer, 982 F.2d 931, 933 (5th Cir. 1993))). The district court appears to cite Correa for its holding that “termination of employees for political reasons is presumptively violative of the 11 Case: 13-40685 Document: 00512769309 Page: 12 Date Filed: 09/15/2014 No. 13-40685 First Amendment.” 982 F.2d at 933. But Correa dealt with a patronage dismissal, unlike this case. Correa requires proof of elements unnecessary for a general First Amendment retaliation claim, namely, that the official conduct against the employee was taken “for political reasons.” Id. Alternatively, Cutler proposes that we should look no further than New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 269–71 (1964), for the clearly established law. The soaring rhetoric and historical sweep of that opinion’s First Amendment statement run headlong into al-Kidd’s repudiation of overly abstract articulations of law. See al-Kidd, 131 S. Ct. at 2084. A better place to start the examination of “clearly established law” is the First Amendment retaliation standard, as it has been consistently applied since Garcetti. In Garcetti, a deputy district attorney reported to his supervisor that there were inaccuracies in an affidavit supporting a search warrant and recommended that the office refrain from prosecuting the case. See 547 U.S. at 413–14, 421. The deputy alleged that he was subjected to a series of retaliatory actions in response to this intra-office speech. Id. at 414. The Supreme Court concluded that the deputy’s speech was not entitled to First Amendment protection because it was made pursuant to his official duties, specifically in fulfillment of his responsibility to advise his supervisor about how best to proceed with a pending case. Id. at 421–23. Yet, Garcetti alone may not “clearly establish” Cutler’s First Amendment right. Garcetti did not “articulate a comprehensive framework for defining the scope of an employee’s duties in cases where there is room for serious debate.” Id. at 424. After all, Garcetti “did not explicate what it means to speak pursuant to one’s official duties, although we do know that a formal job description is not dispositive . . . [,] nor is speaking on the subject matter of 12 Case: 13-40685 Document: 00512769309 Page: 13 Date Filed: 09/15/2014 No. 13-40685 one’s employment.” Williams v. Dall. Indep. Sch. Dist., 480 F.3d 689, 692 (5th Cir. 2007) (per curiam) (citations and internal quotation marks omitted). Several pre-2010 decisions have, however, given the Defendants the “fair warning” they need. This circuit began the task of embroidering Garcetti’s general rule with new fact patterns in 2007 in Williams. There, the court considered whether a memorandum sent by a school athletic director to a school principal about the misuse of athletic funds was official speech. Id. at 689–91. It was undisputed that the director was not required to write memoranda as part of his regular job duties, but the court nonetheless held that his speech was made pursuant to his official duties. Id. at 693–94. The court reasoned that “[a]ctivities undertaken in the course of performing one’s job are activities pursuant to official duties.” Id at 693. The memorandum concerned matters immediately within the athletic director’s purview—the use of funds for the school athletic teams and the related accounting procedures. Thus, the speech was made as part of his official duties. Id. at 694. In Davis, the court held that an information systems auditor spoke in part as a citizen on a matter of public concern when she sent reports to the EEOC, FBI, and university officials seeking investigation into complaints she made while working for the University of Texas system. 518 F.3d at 307–18. Davis worked for the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, and she conducted an audit of university computers and discovered pornography. Id. at 307–08. Davis approached various administrators to address the issue, but she considered their response to be inadequate. Id. at 308–09. She sent a complaint letter to her immediate supervisors and to the Chancellor, in which she noted that she had also filed complaints with the FBI regarding possible child pornography and the EEOC about workplace discrimination. Id. at 309, 314. Davis analyzed the issue based on whether 13 Case: 13-40685 Document: 00512769309 Page: 14 Date Filed: 09/15/2014 No. 13-40685 the speech was directed to internal chains of command or externally and whether the content of the speech was about job concerns or not. See id. at 313–16. Since Davis’s complaints to the FBI and EEOC were clearly made outside of the chain of command and her duties as an auditor did not require that she communicate with law enforcement, the court held that the complaints constituted citizen speech. Id. at 316. Similarly, in Charles v. Grief, 522 F.3d 508 (5th Cir. 2008), this court found that a member of the Texas Lottery Commission spoke as a citizen when he sent an email to members of the Texas Legislature as well as high-ranking Lottery Commission officials raising concerns about racial discrimination and retaliation against him and other minority employees of the Commission. Id. at 510. There the court considered the fact that the speech “was not made in the course of performing or fulfilling his job responsibilities, was not even indirectly related to his job, and was not made to higher-ups in his organization . . . but was communicated directly to elected representatives of the people.” Id. at 514. These cases should have provided Defendants with a clear warning that terminating Cutler on the basis of his speech to Rep. Gohmert’s office—based on the undisputed facts and taking all reasonable inferences in Cutler’s favor— would violate Cutler’s First Amendment right. Assuming that Cutler’s account of his conversations with Rep. Gohmert’s office is credible, as we must do, Cutler’s speech was made externally to a staff member of an “elected representative[] of the people” allegedly about participating in an event that was not within his job requirements. See id. Cutler spoke about concerns entirely unrelated to his job and from a perspective that did not depend on his job as a university employee, but rather emanated from his views as a citizen. See Williams, 480 F.3d at 693–94. Therefore, reasonable officials in the 14 Case: 13-40685 Document: 00512769309 Page: 15 Date Filed: 09/15/2014 No. 13-40685 Defendants’ position should have known on the basis of Charles and Davis that Cutler’s speech was protected as the speech of a citizen and that their decision to terminate Cutler on the basis of that citizen speech would violate Cutler’s First Amendment right.