Opinion ID: 618676
Heading Depth: 5
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Obsolescence of First Amendment Protection

Text: 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.