Heffernan v. City of Paterson, No. 14-1280, 578 U.S.

___ (2016), was a United States

Supreme Court case concerning the First Amendment rights of public employees. By a 62

margin, the Court held that a public employee's constitutional rights might be violated when an

employer, believing that the employee was engaging in what would be protected speech,

disciplines them because of that belief, even if the employee did not exercise such a

constitutional right.

The case was brought after Jeffrey Heffernan, a detective with the Paterson, New Jersey, police

force, went to a distribution center and picked up a lawn sign for the candidate challenging the

city's incumbent mayor in the 2005 election as a favor for his mother. While Heffernan did not

support the challenger, after other officers saw him with the sign they told senior officers,

including the police chief, who strongly supported the mayor. For his apparent public support of

the other candidate, they demoted Heffernan to beat patrol work as a uniformed officer.

Heffernan brought suit alleging that his demotion violated his First Amendment rights. The case

took a decade to reach the Supreme Court. For most of that time it was in federal district court,

where it was heard by three different judges. A jury verdict in Heffernan's favor was set aside. A

later summary judgment in the city's favor was overturned on appeal before being granted again

in the third trial.[1]

Writing for a majority of the Supreme Court, Justice Stephen Breyer stated that the department's

belief was all that mattered, since the Court's precedent in this area holds it is unconstitutional for

a government agency to discipline an employee (who does not work under a contract that

explicitly permits such discipline) for engaging in partisan political activity, as long as that activity

is not disruptive to the agency's operations. Even if Heffernan was not engaging in protected

speech, he wrote, the discipline against him sent a message to others to avoid exercising their

rights. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a dissenting opinion in which he was joined by

Justice Samuel Alito, in which he agreed that Heffernan had been harmed, but his constitutional

rights had not been violated.