Santa Clara County Deputy DA’s Free Speech Claim Partly Revived

Santa Clara County, Calif., District Attorney Jeff Rosen must face a deputy attorney’s claim that he was transferred to less-prestigious courts in retaliation for an op-ed he authored “about certain criminal justice issues,” the Ninth Circuit ruled.

That allegedly adverse job action wasn’t among the “harms” that Daniel Chung’s union put before an arbitrator when it grieved Chung’s 10-day unpaid suspension following a local newspaper’s publication of his opinion piece, an unanimous appeals panel said Tuesday. The deputy attorney therefore wasn’t precluded from litigating the reassignment in court and a district judge was wrong to grant summary judgment for Rosen ...