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Hi and welcome to Amicus, Slate Supreme Court podcast.

I am Dahlia Lithwick, and I cover the High Court for Slate Magazine.

So we're coming at you a few days late this week, and for that we blame the snow.

Here in Virginia now, we're mostly dug out, dusted

off, and ready to act like serious thinkers rather than just mindless consumers of marshmallows

and hot liquid chocolate. Now, this week, we decided to focus on a deeply strange. The word

bizarre was invoked more than once at oral arguments last Tuesday, case involving speech and public employees.

It's almost creeping up on an encyclopedia Brown mystery, the case of the missing constitutional violation.

So the case is called Heffernan v. City of Patterson, and it involves a 20-year veteran police officer of the

Patterson, New Jersey Police Department, who was demoted in 2006 for ostensibly supporting the

wrong mayoral candidate, except he never supported that candidate or any candidate in the first

place. It turns out he was just picking up a yard sign for the wrong candidate

for his bedridden mother. Mistaken identity. Comedy ensues. Confusion. The First Amendment

question at the heart of Heffernan v. Patterson is this. When you are a public employee,

do you have a right not to be retaliated against when the city falsely ascribes a political viewpoint to you that you never even had?

I know, right?

Joining us today to discuss the case are two of the lawyers involved.

The first will be Stuart Banner, a legal historian and the Norman Abrams Professor of Law at the UCLA Law School.

Banner also directs UCLA's Supreme Court Clinic, and he filed this case on behalf of Jeffrey Heffernan, the police officer, who was demoted for his First Amendment speech and values. So welcome to Amicus Stewart Banner. Oh, thanks very much.

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