| Arnett v. Kennedy | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Argued November 7, 1973 Decided April 16, 1974 | |
| Full case name | Arnett, Director, Office of Economic Opportunity, et al. v. Kennedy, et al. |
| Docket no. | 72-1118 |
| Citations | 416 U.S. 134 (more) 94 S.Ct. 1633; 40 L.Ed.2d 15; 1974 U.S. LEXIS 125 |
| Argument | Oral argument |
| Case history | |
| Prior | Summary judgement for plaintiff, sub nom Kennedy v. Sanchez, 349 F. Supp. 863 (N.D. Ill. 1972) |
| Holding | |
| Post-termination procedures provided by federal agency adequately protected appellee's liberty interests and pretermination hearing was not constitutionally necessary; statute under which employee was fired neither impermissibly vague or overbroad to justify dismissal for speech alleging superior was accepting bribes. Northern District of Illinois reversed. | |
| Court membership | |
| |
| Case opinions | |
| Plurality | Rehnquist, joined by Burger, Stewart |
| Concurrence | Powell, joined by Blackmun |
| Concur/dissent | White |
| Dissent | Douglas |
| Dissent | Marshall, joined by Douglas, Brennan |
| Laws applied | |
| Lloyd–La Follette Act, U.S. Const. amend. I, U.S. Const. amend. XIV | |
Overruled by | |
| Cleveland Board of Education v. Loudermill | |
Arnett v. Kennedy, 416 U.S. 134 (1974), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court rejected a nonprobationary federal civil service employee's claim to a full hearing prior to dismissal over charges he had brought the government into disrepute by recklessly accusing a superior of corruption. The governing federal law prescribed not only grounds for removal but also removal procedures. The employee could only be removed for "cause," but the procedures did not provide for an adversarial hearing prior to termination. The Court also rejected the respondent's claim that his First Amendment rights were violated.
The 6–3 decision was widely criticized by legal scholars for Justice William Rehnquist's controversial conceptualization of Kennedy's due process rights in his plurality opinion, joined by only two other justices and explicitly rejected by the others. Rehnquist reasoned that since the state creates property interests such as that Arnett held in his job through its statutes, any procedures the state creates to allow an employee to appeal a termination are thus sufficient to constitute due process. Thus, he wrote, those with such interests "must take the bitter with the sweet".
Justices Byron White and Thurgood Marshall disapprovingly quoted that line in their separate opinions (White concurring that Kennedy's First Amendment rights had not been violated but dissenting from the rest of the holding, while Marshall dissented entirely, joined by two other justices). Justice Lewis Powell, concurring with another justice, also rejected Rehnquist's theory. A later case, Logan v. Zimmerman Brush Co., held differently without explicitly overruling Arnett; in 1985's Cleveland Board of Education v. Loudermill, the Court held that public employees are entitled to some form of hearing before dismissal and formally rejected his "bitter with the sweet" formulation, with Rehnquist (by then Chief Justice) as the only dissenter. Some legal scholars have argued it should have been retained, or that the Court's subsequent disinterest in engaging this question has been to the detriment of its jurisprudence.
The First Amendment aspect of the holding—that the FFLA's provisions that covered employees could only be dismissed for "such cause as will promote the efficiency of the service" was neither overbroad nor so vague that employees lacked notice that speech such as Arnett's could lead to discipline—remains, although it has not been relied on much. After the case was remanded to the district court, Kennedy was again fired. He appealed that to the federal Civil Service Commission and was reinstated with back pay within a year.