Phares v. Gustafsson’s Empirical Analysis
856 F.2d 1003 · 1988
Citation profile
18 federal appellate · 2 district · 2 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 29 later decisions — most recently March 2019 · most notably Gray v. Lacke (1989), Johnnie M. Cliff v. Board of School Commissioners of the City of Indianapolis, Indiana, Mary Busch, Donald Payton (1995)
18 federal appellate · 2 district · 2 state decisions
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Relationships
Relies on Board of Regents of State Colleges v. Roth · Pickering v. Board of Education of Township High School District 205 Will County Illinois · Cleveland Board of Education v. Loudermill · Connick v. Myers · Boddie v. Connecticut
Most-quoted passages
The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 29 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“We do not suggest, however, that Myers’ speech, even if not touching upon a matter of public concern, is totally beyond the protection of the First Amendment. “[T]he First Amendment does not protect speech and assembly only to the extent it can be characterized as political. ‘Great secular causes, with smaller ones, are guarded.’ ” ... We in no sense suggest that speech on private matters falls into one of the narrow and well-defined classes of expression which carries so little social value, such as obscenity, that the State can prohibit and punish such expression by all persons in its jurisdiction.... For example, an employee’s false criticism of his employer on grounds not of public concern may be cause for his discharge but would be entitled to the same protection in a libel action accorded an identical statement made by a man on the street. We hold only that when a public employee speaks not as a citizen upon matters of public concern, but instead as an employee upon matters only of personal interest, absent the most unusual circumstances, a federal court is not the appropriate forum in which to review the wisdom of a personnel decision taken by a public agency allegedly in reaction to the employee’s behavior.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“transform [this] purely private personnel matter into a matter of public concern.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.