Eugene beat me to the punch in posting about the new 9th Circuit case on a teacher wearing a MAGA hat to his school's cultural sensitivity training session, so I will be brief. You can read a longer excerpt from the case in his post below.
I wanted to point out a specific feature of the case, which is how it treated the concept of workplace "disruption" within a Pickering balancing analysis of how government employers can respond to government employee speech. I recently posted about a district court opinion regarding political flyers at a state university that I think did this quite badly. In that case, "the court thought the university had an overriding 'interest in fostering a collegial educational environment,'" and thus could punish professors for distributing flyers on campus criticizing the politics of another professor.
I argue in a forthcoming article that the disruptive workplace component of the Pickering balancing test frequently becomes a means for imposing a heckler's veto on government employees with unpopular political views. Especially in a university context, courts should be extremely sensitive to the possibility that university officials might use the mere fact that some people disagree with a professor's speech as a good reason to suppress the speech. The government employer's legitimate interest in avoiding disruption to the workplace needs to be read much more narrowly, at least in some contexts.
