Givhan v. Western Line Consolidated School District, 439 U.S. 410 (1979), is a United States Supreme Court decision on the free speech rights of public employees.

She joined the ongoing desegregation lawsuit as an intervenor, alleging that her First and Fourteenth Amendment rights to free speech and due process had been violated.

In the early 21st century, its holding in Garcetti v. Ceballos, that speech made by employees pursuant to their job duties was not protected, appeared to some to complicate Givhan although the Court said it would not.

[2] An African American, Bessie Givhan began teaching junior high school-level English at the all-black Norma O'Bannon School in Greenville, Mississippi, in 1963.

[6] She alleged that her dismissal violated not only the terms of that case, which required that the district develop nonracial objective criteria for the retention of teachers and staff, something which it had failed to do,[4] but her own rights to free speech and due process under the First and Fourteenth amendments.

Healthy and Perry v. Sindermann, the "trilogy" of cases brought by educators alleging unconstitutional retaliatory firings that served as precedent for Givhan, Gewin observed, the crucial factor had been that the plaintiffs' speech was public: Pickering had written a letter to the editor, Doyle had shared a memo with a local radio station that then reported its contents as news, and Sindermann had been a public critic of the state college's governing board.

He found another recent case of a public employee's speech rights, Madison School District v. Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission, followed this pattern.

There, the Court had held that the right of a nonunion teacher to speak at a public meeting prevailed over a provision of state labor law that forbade negotiations with anyone not in the bargaining unit.

[17] Based on these two precedents, Gewin wrote: These general principles lead us to conclude that teacher Givhan did not engage in constitutionally protected speech in her expressions to principal Leach.

However, the district court had not reached a verdict on her claims that the ongoing desegregation suit had been violated by her dismissal, so the case was remanded for further proceedings to decide that issue.

Givhan herself, who was working at a community counseling organization as she could not find another teaching job due to the ongoing litigation, flew to Washington to watch those proceedings in person.

[21]While he speculated that, based on its citation to another one of its cases, the Fifth Circuit had also seen the fact that Givhan was speaking to her principal rather than the school board as significant in assessing its disruptive effect on district operations, as per Pickering, Rehnquist did not see a difference there, either.

Therefore, Rehnquist noted, the school district had not been allowed to prove that Givhan's other alleged misconduct was sufficient to fire her if the protected conversations could not be considered.

Justice John Paul Stevens added a short concurrence clarifying that the district court could make that finding on the basis of the existing record, without retrying the case, if it so chose.

Byron White, writing for a five-justice majority, distinguished Myers' conduct from Givhan's first by noting that much of her questionnaire did not touch on what the Court considered to matters of public concern.

"[27] In dissent, William Brennan faulted the majority for conditioning its finding that the questionnaire did not address a matter of public concern in part on it having been distributed privately.

[30] However, Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain wrote a special concurrence arguing that while precedent compelled the holding it should be revisited and overruled, since he did not see public employees as having any protectable personal interest in speech made as part of their job duties.

Kennedy distinguished Ceballos from Givhan and the other plaintiffs who had come before her by noting that while they had spoken as citizens, he was just doing his job: "The controlling factor in Ceballos' case is that his expressions were made pursuant to his duties ... We hold that when public employees make statements pursuant to their official duties, the employees are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline.

"We had no difficulty recognizing that the First Amendment applied when Bessie Givhan, an English teacher, raised concerns about the school's racist employment practices to the principal," noted John Paul Stevens.

The difference between a case like Givhan and this one is that the subject of Ceballos's speech fell within the scope of his job responsibilities, whereas choosing personnel was not what the teacher was hired to do.

[note 3][42] While it had rejected Givhan's but-for test, the court found Rehnquist's fourth footnote particularly dispositive, due to both its factual findings and the unique nature of the work the government agency performed.

When he filed suit in the Eastern District of Louisiana, he argued that his speech was, like Givhan's, made to his superior and thus was not to be considered part of his job duties.

[46] In the majority opinion, Judge John M. Walker, Jr. distinguished Weintraub's speech to his principal from Givhan's to Leach's by noting that hers was not related to her core duties as an English teacher, whereas his was since it concerned classroom discipline.

Further, he continued the speech in the form of a grievance, for which "there is no relevant citizen analogue ... [It is] an internal communication made pursuant to an existing dispute-resolution policy established by his employer.

He felt the majority had read Garcetti too expansively, particularly in the educational context, since so many factors could relate to a teacher's core duties of "effective teaching and classroom learning," as they had described them.

"[49][note 4] Writing in the Western New England Law Review a year after the decision, John Koltes III considered it a generally positive development.

"[It] clarified the weight to be accorded the factors set forth in Pickering and established Doyle as the test to be used when employees assert that their dismissal or transfer was unconstitutionally motivated.

"[50] Nevertheless, he was concerned by how lower courts had been interpreting footnote 4 to consider the time, place and manner of an employee's public speech, when evaluating the constitutionality of the adverse action, citing Janusaitis[41] and another Texas case involving a fired teacher's aide.

"[52] In another contemporary comment, William & Mary law professor Frederick Schauer considered the effect of the decision in extending First Amendment protection to speech made in a private context.

A reading of the opinion may lead lower courts to ignore the extent to which the public-private distinction remains relevant in applying certain accepted justifications for restricting speech.