Connick v. Myers

Connick v. Myers
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued November 8, 1982 Decided April 20, 1983
Full case name	Harry Connick Sr. v. Sheila Myers
Docket no.	81-1251
Citations	461 U.S. 138 (more) 103 S. Ct. 1684; 75 L. Ed. 2d 708
Argument	Oral argument
Case history
Prior	Judgment for plaintiff, 507 F. Supp. 752 (E.D. La. 1981); affirmed, 654 F.2d 719 (5th. Cir. 1981); cert. granted, 455 U.S. 999 (1982).
Holding
Assistant district attorney's distribution of questionnaire on workplace satisfaction following an unwanted transfer was largely a matter of personal interest; her subsequent termination for that action did not violate her First Amendment rights. Fifth Circuit reversed
Court membership
Chief Justice Warren E. Burger Associate Justices William J. Brennan Jr. · Byron White Thurgood Marshall · Harry Blackmun Lewis F. Powell Jr. · William Rehnquist John P. Stevens · Sandra Day O'Connor
Case opinions
Majority	White, joined by Burger, Powell, Rehnquist, O'Connor
Dissent	Brennan, joined by Marshall, Blackmun, Stevens
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amend. I

Connick v. Myers, 461 U.S. 138 (1983), is a United States Supreme Court decision concerning the First Amendment rights of public employees who speak on matters of possible public concern within the workplace context. It was first brought by Sheila Myers, an Orleans Parish, Louisiana, assistant district attorney (ADA). She had been fired by her superior, District Attorney Harry Connick Sr., when, after receiving a transfer she had fiercely resisted in private conversations with him and his chief assistant district attorney, she distributed a questionnaire to her fellow prosecutors asking about their experience with Connick's management practices. At trial, Judge Jack Gordon of the Eastern District of Louisiana found the firing had been motivated by the questionnaire and was thus an infringement on her right to speak out on matters of public concern as a public employee. After the Fifth Circuit affirmed the verdict, Connick appealed to the Supreme Court.

The justices reversed the lower courts by a 5–4 margin. Justice Byron White wrote for the majority that most of the matters Myers' questionnaire had touched on were of personal, not public, concern and that the action had damaged the harmonious relations necessary for the efficient operation of the district attorney's office. William Brennan argued in dissent that the majority's application of precedent was flawed. He argued that all the matters in the questionnaire were of public concern, and feared a chilling effect on speech by public employees about such matters would result.

The case was the first in a line considering the right of public employees to speak contemporaneously with their employment that had started with Pickering v. Board of Education (1968) fifteen years earlier in which the Court sided with the employee. It introduced the test of whether the employee's speech had been on matters of public concern to the balancing of employer and employee interest prescribed in the earlier case. The two would guide the Court's interpretation of later cases such as Rankin v. McPherson^[1] (1987). In the 1990s and 2000s, Waters v. Churchill (1994) and Garcetti v. Ceballos (2006), the latter with some similarities to the circumstances of Connick, would further clarify the Court's holding.