Individual Academic Freedom: An Ordinary Concern of the First Amendment
64 Pages Posted: 28 Mar 2014 Last revised: 14 Aug 2014
Date Written: March 27, 2014
Abstract
This contribution to the Mississippi Law Journal's symposium on education law makes the case that individual academic freedom is not a "special concern of the First Amendment," as the Supreme Court has often said it is. The article tracks the academic freedom case law in the Court and establishes that, while the Court has often extolled the value and virtues of individual academic freedom in its opinion rhetoric, no case it has ever decided has depended for its resolution on a "special" individual right to speech or association that inheres only in academics. The article then fleshes out the implications of this claim for the speech rights of publicly employed academics following the Court's decision in Garcetti v. Ceballos, concluding both that the decision is here to stay, and that recent efforts to craft exceptions to it are unavailing due to the underlying doctrinal structure of the First Amendment.
Keywords: academic freedom, First Amendment, public employee speech, Garcetti, Demers, Adams, academic speech
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