Civics, free speech and litigation

Eugene Volokh:

“Unfairly treated,” I take it, means in context treated in ways that the law recognizes as unfair and therefore civilly actionable. Who might benefit from that? (I focus here on American law, since that’s the only sort of law I know.)

[1.] Many people are unaware of this, but many states, counties, and cities ban even private employers from firing or otherwise disciplining their employees based on the employees’ speech or political activity. What’s covered varies widely: Some jurisdictions protect a very broad range of speech; others protect “political activity” defined broadly enough to protect a wide range of speech related to political matters; others protect only election-related speech (whether about candidates or ballot measures). There’s a map available here, and I also tried including it in this post (right after this paragraph), but a glitch is keeping it from appearing for at least some readers.

I lay out many such statutes in Private Employees’ Speech and Political Activity: Statutory Protection Against Employer Retaliation (2012) (note that Utah has since enacted such a statute), and discuss the policy arguments for and against such statutes in Should the Law Limit Private-Employer-Imposed Speech Restrictions?(2022). It’s also possible that a federal statute would protect people who Tweeted for or against political candidates, though that’s not clear (see pp. 320-24 of my 2012 article).