Opinion ID: 618676
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Abuse Report

Text: Defendants conceded below that Nagle's report of abuse in Virginia raised a matter of public concern, but the district court concluded that the report was not protected when uttered because it undisputedly violated reasonable protocols. Order at 13. We doubt that this question could be decided as a matter of law on the present record, which indicates that Nagle may well have followed school procedures by reporting to her principal the verbal abuse that she had overheard. Some time laterafter Moore had already left Nagle's schoolNagle informed both Child Protective Services and the state police of what she had personally overheard and what others had told her. It is not clear from the record that Nagle's conduct in these circumstances violated any protocols. This lack of factual clarity does not matter, because the district court's reasoning finds no support in Second Circuit or Supreme Court case law, which has never conditioned First Amendment protection on adherence to employer protocols. An employee's failure to follow protocols may give rise to an alternative, non-retaliatory ground for an adverse employment action. And as such, it could be the basis of a successful causation defense. That possibility, which is discussed infra, is very different from the lower court's holding that failure to abide by rules deprived the speech of First Amendment protections. Here, as it did also with respect to obsolescence, see infra subsection B.2.b., the district court confused a question of causation with the very different question of whether speech is protected. In sum, neither the record nor the law permitted the district court to find that Nagle's Virginia speech lost its First Amendment protection because of protocol violations. Defendants conceded below that Nagle's report of abuse would have been protected when uttered but for the alleged protocol violation. We therefore need only consider defendants' remaining argument that the report lost its First Amendment protection due to obsolescence.
The district court held that Nagle's Virginia speech presented a `transferred speech' scenario. Order at 10. [6] This, it said, required the court to determine not only whether Nagle's report of abuse was protected when originally uttered in Virginia, but also, separately, whether it remained protected after the passage of time and [Nagle's] relocation to a new community. Id. at 10-11. The court concluded that, even had Nagle's Virginia speech been protected when it was first made, it had become old news by the time of the events at issue in this lawsuit. It would therefore have lost, in New York, any First Amendment protection it might have had in Virginia. Order at 16. The district court cited no authority for its conclusion that the situation required two separate determinations with respect to First Amendment protection. [7] This novel approach is neither necessary nor warranted by First Amendment law. The district court appears to have confused the first prong of the First Amendment inquiry, which asks whether the speech at issue was protected, with the last, which examines whether the protected speech caused the adverse employment action. Whether speech pertained to a matter of public concern and whether it was uttered in the speaker's capacity as a private person are not facts that change over time. A teacher's expressive conduct made in the course of working for a candidate's political campaign, for instance, would constitute protected speech even if the candidate lost and his candidacy therefore ceased being a matter of immediate public concern. And the speech would remain protected if the teacher moved to an area where the candidate had not been on the ballot. The First Amendment protects precisely such public participation, both at the time it occurs and ever after. What can grow stale, over time and distance, is not an expressive act's First Amendment protection but its relevance to the plaintiff's employers. To establish causation, a plaintiff must show that the protected speech `was a substantial motivating factor in the adverse employment action.' Cioffi, 444 F.3d at 167 (quoting Morris, 196 F.3d at 110). It is quite plausible that an employer would simply have no interest, or lose any interest it once had, in an employee's long-ago protected speech. Speech that did not matter to an employer would likely not be a motivating factor in an employment action. And we may assume that this is what the district court meant when it made the factual determination that Nagle's actions would have been old news and of limited interest to Appellees. Order at 16. But that says nothing about whether the speech was protected. The inquiry into causation is legally, as well as logically, distinct from the question of whether the speech was protected to begin with and must be kept separate from that preliminary question.
The district court concluded that Nagle's speech could not have caused the adverse employment action because Fried had already decided not to recommend her for tenure before he learned of her Virginia speech: [a]lthough Superintendent Fried cannot recall exactly when he became aware of [Nagle's protected speech in Virginia], he believes he was, at the time, already leaning toward not recommending [Nagle] for tenure. Order at 20. This testimony, however, by itself, indicates that a grant of summary judgment against Nagle is reversible error. First, it is established that an adverse employment action occurs on the date that a decision was formally reached. Cioffi, 444 F.3d at 163 (holding that an adverse employment action dated not from a closed meeting at which an informal consensus regarding the matter was reached, but rather from an official meeting with a formal vote and a publicly declared outcome). Events leading up to a formal decision will, in many situations, be relevant to the analysis of causation. But an employer cannot insulate itself from liability at the summary judgment stage simply by asserting that an adverse employment decision had in fact already been made, without being memorialized or conveyed to anyone, before the employer learned of the protected conduct. [8] Nagle was informed that she would not be recommended for tenure on March 2, 2007. On the facts of this case, that is the date on which the adverse employment action took place. Second, and as important, Fried did not testify that a decision had already been made, or even that a consensus had been reached, not to retain Nagle when the information about the Virginia events reached him in early 2007. All Fried said was that he was leaning that way. [9] In such circumstances, a jury would be entitled to find that the Virginia events convinced him to follow his inclinations, and thereby played a part in his ultimate decision. A plaintiff can . . . establish a causal connection to support a . . . retaliation claim by `showing that the protected activity was closely followed in time by the adverse [employment] action.' Gorman-Bakos, 252 F.3d at 554 (alteration in original) (quoting Reed v. A.W. Lawrence & Co., 95 F.3d 1170, 1178 (2d Cir.1996)); see also Higdon v. Jackson, 393 F.3d 1211, 1220 (11th Cir.2004) (noting that causality can be shown through a close temporal proximity between [the employer's] awareness [of protected conduct] and the adverse action (internal quotation marks and alteration omitted)); Wyatt v. City of Boston, 35 F.3d 13, 16 (1st Cir.1994) (per curiam) (One way of showing causation is by establishing that the employer's knowledge of the protected activity was close in time to the employer's adverse action.). Fried testified that he became aware of Nagle's report of abuse in Virginia in late January or February of 2007, that is, at most six weeks before the adverse employment action on March 2, 2007. While we have not drawn a bright line defining the maximum time period that can give rise to an inference of causation, Gorman-Bakos, 252 F.3d at 554, six weeks fits comfortably within any line we might draw. It follows that Nagle's showing of temporal proximity suffices to make out a prima facie claim of retaliation under the First Amendment. Appellees counter that, to the extent Nagle's Virginia speech influenced them, it was not the content of that speech that mattered but what they took to be Nagle's violation of school rules in reporting the abuse to the police rather than to her principal. But on the question of whether protected speech played a significant part of the decision to dismiss Nagle, this counter, if anything, is evidence against Appellees' position. Just what Appellees believed about Nagle's conduct in Virginia, and how, if at all, those beliefs influenced their actions may well be issues critical to resolving this case. [10] That these questions turn on unresolved factual disputes, however, precludes summary judgment. Appellees characterize Castar and Fried's understanding of Nagle's Virginia speech as mirror[ing] Castar's experience with [Nagle's] failing to follow . . . District[] protocol on two occasions in New York, a claim they rest on two specific events. Appellees' Br. 29. The factual bases Appellees present, however, are insufficient to dispose of the question at summary judgment. On one cited occasion, Nagle chose a particular book to read with her class without first consulting the school psychologist, Barbara Merling. Beyond stating that Merling believed that [Nagle] should have consulted with her, however, Appellees have provided no evidence that school customs or protocols required such a consultation. On the second occasion, Nagle did not confer with administrative staff before sending a child home from school early. But Principal Castar himself testified that Nagle's decision to send a child home early without speaking to administrators did not violate any existing rules, protocols, or customs at the school. While, with further factual development, a jury could conceivably conclude that these events caused Appellees in good faith to question Nagle's judgment and her amenability to supervision, Appellees have not presented sufficient evidence to dispose of this question at summary judgment.
Because protected speech could not substantially cause an adverse action if the employer would have taken that action in any event, a defendant can rebut a prima facie showing of retaliation by demonstrating by a preponderance of the evidence that it would have taken the same adverse employment action `even in the absence of the protected conduct.' Morris, 196 F.3d at 110(quoting Mount Healthy City Sch. Dist. Bd. of Educ. v. Doyle, 429 U.S. 274, 287, 97 S.Ct. 568, 50 L.Ed.2d 471 (1977)). Under this standard, at this stage of the proceedings, Appellees are entitled to summary judgment if they can show that a reasonable jury would have to find by a preponderance of the evidence that Appellees would have dismissed Nagle even had they not learned of her Virginia speech. Appellees specifically point to Cosgrove v. Federal Home Loan Bank of New York, Nos. 90-civ-6455 (RPP), 92-civ-4225 (RPP), 1999 WL 163218 (S.D.N.Y. Mar. 23, 1999), as directly analogous to the present case. In Cosgrove, a bank examiner claimed her employer had impermissibly fired her for reporting to the FBI improper lending practices that the examiner had discovered in an investigation. The plaintiff in that case had received numerous indications (several memoranda, evaluations, and warnings per year) that her work failed to meet her employer's standards and that her interpersonal skills were interfering with her job performance. Id. at -. The district court concluded in Cosgrove that, although the plaintiff's FBI report may have constituted protected speech, the plentiful documentation of her ongoing problems showed as a matter of law that her employer would have fired her irrespective of the FBI report. Id. at . Unlike Cosgrove, however, Appellees themselves have characterized evaluations of Nagle during her probationary period as ranging from fair to positive. Fried testified that official in-classroom observations [of Nagle] were positive. Also in contrast to the plaintiff in Cosgrove, Nagle had not received years of warnings about problems with her interpersonal skills. On the contrary, Castar testified that, besides a complaint from the school psychologist regarding Nagle's choice of a particular book to read with her class, [t]here weren't complaints about Nagle. He further testified that, as the school implemented a new teaching model that integrated special education students into the mainstream student population, other teachers told [him] that they would not teach in this program unless [Nagle] was the special ed teacher there. Defendants have, in sum, provided no evidence of ongoing problems with Nagle's work or work relationships of the sort documented in Cosgrove. According to Fried's testimony, his decision not to recommend Nagle for tenure rested not on an accumulation of negative evaluations and problems but on what he heard from third parties about Nagle's behavior at a single meeting in December 2006. At that meeting, Nagle had intimated that she knew she would not be granted tenure and had become so upset that she cried and left the room for a while to calm down. At one pointand in tension with some of the other testimony regarding the effect of the Virginia eventsFried testified that he came to the conclusion that [Nagle] should not receive tenure because of her behavior at the meeting. Fried did not himself attend this meeting but learned of it from conversations with Castar and Esposito. Viewing this record in the light most favorable to Nagle, we cannot find as a matter of law that Fried would have made his decision irrespective of learning of Nagle's report of abuse in Virginia. There was no pattern of bad evaluations, complaints, and warnings, as there was in Cosgrove. There was no specific instance of misconduct. All this is in direct contrast with most of the cases Appellees cite to support their position. Moreover, there is no documentation of Fried's decision-making process prior to learning of Nagle's Virginia speech. While it is certainly possible that an employee's behavior at a single meeting can be so egregious as to merit dismissal, we do not think that crying and leaving the room to calm down suffices, as a matter of law, to overcome a prima facie showing of retaliation. The record raises genuine issues of material fact as to why Appellees acted as they did, and [s]ummary judgment is precluded where questions regarding an employer's motive predominate in the inquiry regarding how important a role the protected speech played in the adverse employment decision. Morris, 196 F.3d at 110. [11]