The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the First Amendment does not shield public employees from disciplinary action for job-related speech.

By a vote of 5-4, the court restricted civil servants’ ability to file lawsuits against agency retaliation over the disclosure of government misconduct.

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in the case, Garcetti v. Ceballos, which concerned a work-related memorandum written by Los Angeles County prosecutor Richard Ceballos about possible police misconduct. Ceballos said that as a result of his memo, he was demoted and reassigned to an office farther away from his home.

The high court said the office could take action based on Ceballos’ memo.

“When public employees make statements pursuant to their official duties,” Kennedy said in his decision, “the employees are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their their communications from employer discipline.” source: Govexec.com

It will be difficult for government workers to discern when speech is part of the job, said Joanne Royce, general counsel for the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit whistleblower advocacy group.

Tuesday’s ruling will “inevitably have a chilling effect on the willingness of public employees to risk their livelihood to try to improve the place where they work,” Royce said. “If they blow the whistle or raise issues of concern — fraud, waste, abuse within their agencies — they can be fired for it. They have no protection under the law.”

 The Court also wrote:

Exposing governmental inefficiency and misconduct is a matter of considerable significance, and various measures have been adopted to protect employees and provide checks on supervisors who would order unlawful or otherwise inappropriate actions. These include federal and state whistle-blower protection laws and labor codes and, for government attorneys, rules of conduct and constitutional obligations apart from the First Amendment. However, the Court’s precedents do not support the existence of a constitutional cause of action behind every statement a public employee makes in the course of doing his or her job. Pp. 13–14.