Richard Ceballos v. Gil Garcetti Frank Sundstedt Carol Najera County of Los Angeles

Richard Ceballos filed this action pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983 contending that he was subjected to adverse employment actions by his supervisors at the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office in retaliation for engaging in speech protected by the First Amendment. He also asserts that the county fails to train, supervise, and discipline its district attorneys regarding such unlawful retaliation.

The district court granted a motion for summary judgment in favor of the individual defendants — the District Attorney (in his individual capacity), the then-Head Deputy District Attorney, and Ceballos’s immediate supervisor — on the basis of qualified immunity, and granted a separate motion for summary adjudication in favor of the county defendants — the county and the District Attorney (in his official capacity) — on the basis of Eleventh Amendment immunity. Given that the disputed facts must be resolved in Ceballos’s favor and that all inferences that may reasonably be drawn must also be drawn in his favor, we reverse the district court’s rulings. We hold that, for purposes of summary judgment, qualified immunity was not available to the individual defendants because the law was…

specially concurring:

I write separately because although I concur in the court’s opinion that Roth v. Veteran’s Administration of the United States, 856 F.2d 1401 (9th Cir.1988), controls the result, I believe that Roth was wrongly decided and that it ought to be overruled, perhaps even by our court’s rehearing the present case en banc.

I

As we recently recounted, see Roe v. City of San Diego, 356 F.3d 1108, 1114-15 (9th Cir.2004), for much of this Nation’s history, our courts generally accepted then-judge Holmes’s immoderately narrow view of the First Amendment rights of public employees: “[A constable] may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman.” McAuliffe v. Mayor of New Bedford, 155 Mass. 216, 220 , 29 N.E. 517 (Mass.1892). Beginning in the mid-part of the twentieth century, in response to the proliferation of loyalty oaths and other grave restrictions on the expressive and associational rights of public employees, the Supreme Court dramatically began to cast aside the Holmesian logic. See, e.g., Keyishian v. Board of Regents, 385 U.S. 589 , 87 S.Ct. 675 , 17 L.Ed.2d 629 (1967) (invalidating state statutes denying…

361 F.3d 1168 Richard CEBALLOS, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Gil GARCETTI; Frank Sundstedt; Carol Najera; County of Los Angeles, Defendants-Appellees. No. 02-55418. United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit. Argued and Submitted June 2, 2003. Filed March 22, 2004. COPYRIGHT MATERIAL OMITTED Humberto Guizar and Luis Carillo, Montebello, CA, for the Plaintiff-Appellant. Cindy S. Lee and Adrian Barrio, Glendale, CA, for the Defendants-Appellees. Appeal from the United States District Court for the Central District of California; A. Howard Matz, District Judge, Presiding. D.C. No. CV-00-11106-AHM. Before: REINHARDT, O'SCANNLAIN, and FISHER, Circuit Judges. REINHARDT, Circuit Judge: 1 Richard Ceballos filed this action pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983 contending that he was subjected to adverse employment actions by his supervisors at the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office in retaliation for engaging in speech protected by the First Amendment. He also asserts that the county fails to train, supervise, and discipline its district attorneys regarding such unlawful retaliation. 2 The district court granted a motion for summary judgment in favor of the individual defendants…