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Supreme Court tackles workplace free speech

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From: Sunday Gazette-Mail
Date: 20060604
Author:George Will

WASHINGTON - In 1892, when First Amendment jurisprudence was in its infancy, Oliver Wendell Holmes, then a justice on the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, said that a policeman "may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman."

Holmes had a flair for aphorisms, the clarity of which sometimes gave them excessive sweep. What he meant in the case of a policeman fired for collecting money for a political committee was that government has a right, for reasons of efficiency, to discipline an officer for speech that, had it been made by ...

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