Givhan v. Western Line Consolidated School District

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1979 U.S. Supreme Court case about free speech rights of public employees

1979 United States Supreme Court case

Givhan v. Western Line Consolidated School District, 439 U.S. 410 (1979), is a United States Supreme Court decision on the free speech rights of public employees. The Court held unanimously in favor of a schoolteacher fired for her critical remarks in conversations with her principal. Justice William Rehnquist wrote the opinion, with a short concurrence by John Paul Stevens .

The petitioner , Bessie Givhan, had believed that various policies and practices of the newly integrated Western Line School District in Mississippi were meant to sustain school segregation . In private meetings with her new principal, she persistently complained about this. The principal in turn recommended the district not rehire her, citing those conversations as well as some other issues. She joined the ongoing desegregation lawsuit as an intervenor , alleging that her First and Fourteenth Amendment rights to free speech and due process had been violated. The district court hearing the case agreed, but then the Fifth Circuit reversed that decision, holding that since she had not spoken publicly she was not entitled to constitutional protection, distinguishing her case from two other recent decisions in which the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of non-tenured teachers let go by their districts following critical statements by noting that in those cases, the criticism had been expressed in a public context.

Rehnquist's opinion rejected that distinction, calling the Fifth Circuit's reading too narrow. He further rejected its claim that Givhan had forced herself on an unwilling listener, since the principal had invited her in. Since the district had cited other, potentially permissible reasons for its action, the Court remanded the case to the district court to apply the Mt. Healthy test , from one of the other two cases involving teachers, and determine if the district had adequate reason to fire her other than the speech. Three years later, the lower court found that it did not, and ordered Givhan reinstated after a 12-year absence.

The Court has not had to significantly revisit the holding since then, and it has not been subject to much commentary or legal analysis. Four years later, in _Connick v. Myers _, its next case on the free speech rights of public employees, it began to limit Givhan and its predecessors by sketching out a test for whether the employee's speech was on a matter of public concern. In the early 21st century, its holding in _Garcetti v. Ceballos _, that speech made by employees pursuant to their job duties was not protected, appeared to some to complicate Givhan although the Court said it would not.

Underlying dispute

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An African American , Bessie Givhan began teaching junior high school -level English at the all-black Norma O'Bannon School in Greenville, Mississippi , in 1963. As with other school districts in the South in the wake of the Supreme Court 's 1955 _Brown v. Board of Education _ decision, a lawsuit had been brought to desegregate schools in the state. In the middle of 1970, the schools in the Greenville area were formally integrated per the Supreme Court's order in _Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education _ that Southern schools desegregate immediately. She was reassigned to Riverside High School in Avon , 30 miles (48 km) away.

At the beginning of the 1971 school year she was transferred again, to Glen Allan High School, near Avon. Years later she described Glen Allan as a "stepchild" within the newly created Western Line Consolidated School District . With a larger proportion of black students and faculty than the other two high schools in the new district, it was short of fundamental resources compared to them. "You could not compare [them]", she recalled in 2006.

She complained frequently to the principal, a white former teacher named James Leach. "I requested a pointer for my blackboard and an eraser, things of this sort that I needed as a teacher," she said. This did not endear her to Leach or the district administration. "I was labeled 'hostile' and 'unreasonable.'" At the end of the year she was informed that her contract would not be renewed. Leach told the superintendent that although she was "a competent teacher" she often had "an insulting and hostile attitude" and made "petty and unreasonable demands." She insisted that she be told why, and in a letter to her the district cited her refusal to administer standardized tests , her refusal to cooperate with the administration and an "antagonistic and hostile attitude ... throughout the school year."

In lower courts

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Givhan's case was heard first in federal district court, as part of the larger desegregation action against the school district. After it ruled in her favor, the school district appealed and won a partial reversal.

District court

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Givhan joined the ongoing lawsuit in federal court for the Northern District of Mississippi over the integration of the school districts within its jurisdiction as an intervenor . She alleged that her dismissal violated not only the terms of that case, which required that the district develop nonracial objective criteria for the retention of teachers and staff, something which it had failed to do, but her own rights to free speech and due process under the First and Fourteenth amendments .

During the two-day bench trial , the district offered other reasons that it claimed justified her dismissal, not all of them speech-related, in addition to the standardized tests she did not administer (at the time, Givhan had argued that students had insufficient time to prepare for them). She had supposedly walked out of a meeting on the desegregation plan along with other teachers in 1969 and blown their car horns in an effort to disrupt the meeting; and in 1970 she and other teachers had threatened not to come to work after the midyear integration. Lastly, they said, she had helped a student conceal a knife he was in possession of during a search while at Riverside.

Givhan admitted this last incident, but the district court found it to be unrelated to

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