Amicus Brief: Adams v. County of Sacramento

This is a case out of the Ninth Circuit, now on petition to the Supreme Court, about a police official getting fired over a text message she sent to a colleague. It's about cancel culture with modern communications and how the Supreme Court's First Amendment doctrine should deal with the speech of public employees in light of technological developments. 

Kate Adams was a chief of police in California who sent an anti-racism text message to a friend commenting on how someone sent her a racist meme. Years later, in a saga with a backstory filled with vengeance and pettiness, that once-friend brought up the text messages Adams sent while he was being investigated for misconduct. The city decided the texts themselves could be viewed as racist and fired Adams. She sued for many reasons, including that she was fired in retaliation for her speech. 

The lower courts ruled against Adams because current doctrine doesn't have a clear category for Adams's speech. It’s clear that the government can't fire someone for holding a sign at a campaign rally, which is classic political speech on matters of “public concern,” but it can fire someone for speech that’s about the job and disruptive to the job. A Ninth Circuit panel ruled 2-1 that Adams's text messages were not protected speech by applying a cramped version of that "public concern” test. This is a good case for the Supreme Court to use to clarify that test, especially at a time when digital communications are stored forever. Current jurisprudence is simply unsettled in cases of private, off-duty public-employee speech.

Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.

Trevor Burrus is a legal policy fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

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