Waters v. Churchill

Waters v. Churchill, 511 U.S. 661 (1994), is a United States Supreme Court case concerning the First Amendment rights of public employees in the workplace. By a 7–2 margin the justices held that it was not necessary to determine what a nurse at a public hospital had actually said while criticizing a supervisor's staffing practices to coworkers, as long as the hospital had formed a reasonable belief as to the content of her remarks and reasonably believed that they could be disruptive to its operations. They vacated a Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in her favor, and ordered the case remanded to district court to determine instead if the nurse had been fired for the speech or other reasons, per the Court's ruling two decades prior in _Mt. Healthy City School District Board of Education v. Doyle _.

The case had first been brought by Cheryl Churchill, a nurse in the obstetrics ward at McDonough District Hospital, operated by the city of Macomb, Illinois . During a dinner break one night in early 1987, she had been talking with another nurse who was considering transferring to obstetrics. In that conversation she made statements critical of cross-training practices recently implemented by the hospital's nursing supervisor, Cindy Waters, and referred to personal issues between the two. Another nurse who overheard the conversation believed Churchill's comments about Waters had dissuaded her interlocutor from the transfer, and reported it to Waters. After an investigation in which Churchill alleged she was never asked about what she had said, she was fired .

There were four separate opinions. Sandra Day O'Connor wrote for a four-justice plurality that the government has a lower obligation to respect constitutional rights when it acts as employer rather than as the sovereign. Accordingly, in that situation it should not be required to meet a due process standard greater than the reasonableness of its own finding of fact. David Souter added a short concurring opinion qualifying the plurality, which he said was in fact a majority, with his insistence that in such cases the government must demonstrate that its understanding of what the employee said was not only a reasonable belief but a truthful one. Antonin Scalia concurred as well, but harshly criticized O'Connor's opinion. He read it as requiring a procedural handling of every possible adverse personnel action where First Amendment rights might be implicated, providing "more questions than answers". John Paul Stevens ' dissent argued that the First Amendment required that the lower court determine exactly what Churchill had said before ruling on whether it was protected.

Outside commentators have also been critical of the decision, since it might discourage whistleblowers . In addition to echoing Stevens' concerns, they have seen it as abandoning any concern for the truth, imposing a heavy burden on a plaintiff , relying on an overly narrow conception of the public's interest, and possibly discouraging people from entering public service. The decision resulted in a lower court changing its ruling in a high-profile case involving controversial academic Leonard Jeffries .

Contents

• 1 Dispute

• 2 Lower courts

  • 2.1 District court

  • 2.2 Appeal

• 3 Supreme Court

  • 3.1 Before the Court

  • 3.2 Decision

    • 3.2.1 Majority

      • 3.2.1.1 Plurality opinion

      • 3.2.1.2 Souter concurrence

      • 3.2.1.3 Scalia concurrence

    • 3.2.2 Dissent

• 4 Subsequent jurisprudence

  • 4.1 Heffernan v. City of Paterson

  • 4.2 Appeals courts

    • 4.2.1 Academic freedom cases

      • 4.2.1.1 Jeffries v. Harleston

      • 4.2.1.2 Burnham v. Ianni

    • 4.2.2 Shahar v. Bowers

    • 4.2.3 Wright v. Illinois Dept. of Children & Family Services

    • 4.2.4 Other appellate cases

  • 4.3 Analysis and commentary

• 5 See also

• 6 Notes

• 7 References

• 8 Further reading

• 9 External links

Dispute

(https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Waters_v._Churchill&action=edit&section=1 "Edit section: Dispute")

Churchill had been hired as a part-time nurse at McDonough in 1982, and promoted to full-time status three years later. She worked for the next two years in the obstetrics ward. She had generally received favorable performance evaluations until Waters became her supervisor in the middle of 1986.

That happened a few months after Kathy Davis took over as the hospital's vice president of nursing. Waters had been implementing Davis's policy of cross-training , under which nurses were in areas overstaffed on a particular shift were reassigned to departments that needed more nurses. Churchill was one of several employees who had voiced objections to the way the policy was being implemented. She and other critics feared that it was primarily being used to address staffing shortages without providing adequate training, with detrimental effects on patient care.

Churchill's criticisms had been long voiced by one of the hospital's obstetricians, Dr. Thomas Koch. During a 1982 malpractice suit he had blamed a stillbirth on nursing shortages created, he alleged, by hospital policies, and had continued the criticism since then. Churchill and he became friends and allies, with her providing inside information on nursing policies that he then used to criticize the administration. She believed this incurred her the enmity of administrators who were by summer of 1986 keeping a file of criticisms of Koch made by Davis and nursing supervisor Cindy Waters.

That August, an incident occurred that bore out Churchill and Koch's concerns, and began the sequence of events that led to the lawsuit. During a difficult delivery, Koch called for a "Code pink " emergency, indicating danger to the life of mother and/or child. A probationary nurse, Mary Lou Ballew, did not know how to properly signal the emergency and did not alert all the necessary personnel. Churchill responded and helped Koch prepare for an emergency Cesarean section .

After the surgery, Churchill was completing paperwork in the delivery room when Waters looked in on a patient in the early stages of labor Churchill had been attending to across the hall. She ordered Churchill to check on that patient. Churchill responded "You don't need to tell me what to do", and then complied with the order. Koch was very upset by this interference. At a meeting the next day with Waters and Stephen Hopper, the hospital's president and chief executive officer , he criticize

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