New York Employment Lawyer Blog

I once defended a New York State prison that was sued for violating an inmate’s First Amendment rights. The inmate was a Rastafarian and his dreadlocks were shaved off by the prison. The inmate claimed that his dreadlocks were an expression of his faith and therefore protected by the First Amendment. He lost his case and this was part of a trend of Courts narrowing the First Amendment.

More recently, a teacher lost her First Amendment case. She gave a gay student two religious pamphlets that harped on the sinfulness of homosexuality. The student told the school about this and the teacher was fired.

She sued the state run college under Section 1983 claiming that her speech was protected by the First Amendment. The Seventh Circuit held that free speech is alive and well in the classroom, but that this speech had nothing to do with the classroom. The court held that the religious anti-gay pamphlets had no connection to the subject matter of the course, cosmetology, and therefore the First Amendment did not apply.

The court found that [T]he college had an interest in ensuring that its instructors stay on message while they were supervising the beauty clinic, just as it had an interest in ensuring that the instructors do the same while in the class room." Further, "[the plaintiff's] 'speech,' both verbal and through the pamphlets she put in [the student's] pocket, was not related to her job of instructing students in cosmetology. Indeed, if it did anything, it inhibited her ability to perform that job by undermining her relationship with [that student] and other students who disagreed with or were offended by her expressions of her beliefs. … [T]he college reasonably took the position that non-germane discussions of religion and other matters had no place in the classroom, because they could impede the school's educational mission," the court said.

Piggee v. Carl Sandburg Coll., No. 05-3228, 2006 WL 2771669 (7th Cir. Sept. 19, 2006).