Volume 746 — Federal Reporter, Third Series

Demers v. Austin (746 F.3d 402, 9th Cir., 2014) was a landmark decision of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, extending First Amendment protection to professors at public universities for on-the-job speech that deals with public issues related to teaching or scholarship, whether inside or outside of the classroom. Demers carved out an exception to a 2006 U.S. Supreme Court decision (Garcetti v. Ceballos) that denied free speech protection to public employees. In doing so, Demers provided, for the first time in history, constitutional protection for faculty speech that criticizes policies and decisions of university administrations. In 2009, Demers, a tenured faculty member in the Edward R.

Gobeille v. Liberty Mutual Insurance Co., 577 U.S. ___ (2016), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that a Vermont state law requiring the disclosure of certain information relating to health care services was preempted by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) to the extent that the state law applied to ERISA plans. Writing for a majority of the Court, Justice Anthony Kennedy held that the Vermont law "impose[d] duties that are inconsistent with the central design of ERISA, which is to provide a single uniform national scheme for the administration of ERISA plans without interference from laws of the several States".