This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, October 5th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Do certain union fees violate the First Amendment? The Supreme Court will take up that

question again in its current term in the case of Janice v. AFSme. Jacob

Hubert represents Mark Janice. We spoke before the High court took the case at the State Policy Network annual

meeting in San Antonio.

Well, for decades, governments have been able to force their employees to pay union fees.

Under a decision the Supreme Court issued in 1977

called Abood versus Detroit Board of Education,

governments have been allowed to make people pay union

fees as a condition of their employment.

But in recent years, in some recent decisions, the court's conservative justices have signaled that they might be

willing to overturn that precedent and hold that forcing government workers to

pay union fees violates their First Amendment rights.

All right, so we had the Friedrich case. fees violates their First Amendment rights.

All right.

So we had the Friedrich's case, which was strongly related to this, right?

Yeah, in 2015 the court took Friedrichs versus California Teachers Association

which presented this same question of whether governments can make their

employees pay union fees and we thought that was going to resolve this issue

but unfortunately Justice Scalia died shortly

after oral arguments in the case so it ended in a four-four tie and nothing changed.

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