"Three University of Florida professors were denied permission from the school to testify in a major voting rights case " What the fuck is 'permission to testify'? I thought access to justice was a constitutional right. If you can't get anyone to tesrify, then you have no access to justice. We have surrendered so many rights in various contracts, we hardly have any freedoms left.
The professors were looking to make money by testifying against the interests of their employer's parent organization: > "the university denied requests of these full-time employees to undertake outside paid work that is adverse to the university's interests as a state of Florida institution." This seems reasonable to me; if they want to testify to express themselves, they can still do it pro-bono, otherwise, they sh…
Broadly speaking in the US everyone has many constitutional protections against the government restricting them in certain ways. When you become a government employee you give up only the most narrow subset of the protections necessary for the government to effectively be your boss.
This means the professors have a reasonably strong court case as mentioned by their lawyer in TFA.
See for example https://www.popehat.com/2013/09/05/ninth-circuit-clarifies-f...
> First a court must determine whether or not the speech is on a matter of public interest. Speech on matters of public interest are entitled to protection, even when uttered by employees; speech on purely private matters (like, say, a private and internal spat among employees) is not. Then the court must balance the employer's interest in an orderly and efficient workplace against the speech rights of the employee, taking into account things like whether the speech restriction is content-based (that is, whether it censors some viewpoints but not others), the circumstances of the speech, the strength of the employee's interest in the speech, whether the speech genuinely disrupts discipline and order and interferes with relationships, and so on.