It may surprise many Americans to learn that U.S. teachers don’t automatically have greater free-speech protections than a country without a First Amendment.
Sarah Morse, an American working as a history teacher at a high school in Arbroath, Scotland, responded to students, telling them she is Catholic and opposes abortion, when her teenage pupils asked her directly what she believed as they were studying Nazism. She told them they were free to have their own opinions. The Angus Council fired her a few hours later.
Morse is now going before an employment tribunal seeking relief. She is demanding the council show that it followed fair process, gave her a hearing, and had an articulable legal basis before she was terminated.
Morse’s case unfolded under British employment law, but the question it raises is not a foreign one. American teachers face the same scenario, and the answer for them turns on a body of U.S. case law most people have never had reason to learn.
An American teacher who said the same thing would be wrong to assume the free-speech and free-exercise guarantees found in the First Amendment offer her absolute protection. Under Garcetti v. Ceballos, speech delivered as part
