Teachers Can't Promote Peace?

[Doug]

When one of Deborah Mayer's elementary school students asked her on the eve of the Iraq war whether she would ever take part in a peace march, the veteran teacher recalls answering, "I honk for peace."

Soon afterward, Mayer lost her job and her home in Indiana. She was out of work for nearly three years. And when she complained to federal courts that her free-speech rights had been violated, the courts replied, essentially, that as a public school teacher she didn't have any.

As a federal appeals court in Chicago put it in January, a teacher's speech is "the commodity she sells to an employer in exchange for her salary." The Bloomington, Ind., school district had just as much right to fire Mayer, the court said, as it would have if she were a creationist who refused to teach evolution.

The ruling was legally significant. Eight months earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had decided in a case involving the Los Angeles district attorney's office that government employees were not protected by the First Amendment when they faced discipline for speaking at work about controversies related to their jobs. The Chicago appeals court was the first to apply the same rationale to the classroom, an issue that the Supreme Court expressly left unresolved.

But legal analysts said the Mayer ruling was probably less important as a precedent than as a stark reminder that the law provides little protection for schoolteachers who express their beliefs.

As far as the courts are concerned, "public education is inherently a situation where the government is the speaker, and ... its employees are the mouthpieces of the government," said Vikram Amar, a professor at UC's Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. Whatever academic freedom exists for college teachers is "much, much less" in public schools, he said.

Read the rest here.

[LaWood]

I got a hunch that after Demos take over in 09 the Supreme Bench needs to be expanded to about 13 justices.

[Doug]

I got a hunch that after Demos take over in 09 the Supreme Bench needs to be expanded to about 13 justices.

DOUG
It can be done. The Constitution does not specify the number of justices, and the number has varied. However, the Demos would have to have a dominant number of seats in both houses to keep Republicans from blocking any such measure.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

In fact, trying to expand the number of Justices would probably backfire on the Dems - it did on FDR. However, our waffling sometimes liberal (he apparently votes the vatican on abortion issues) justice may feel it safe to retire if the Dems get the White House and retain/strengthen their majority in the Senate. We could get a real progressive - somebody interested in the Constitution all the time, not just when it suits his or her fancy - in then. And even relatively healthy, relatively young justices like the Fascist Four can get hit by a truck or be in an airplane crash (unlikely I know, since those fates seem to be reserved for progressive Dems).