Dr. Allan Josephson spoke at an event hosted by the Heritage Foundation in 2017 and made remarks concerning gender dysphoria in children that angered several colleagues. Weeks later, the university gave into the demands of Dr. Josephson’s colleagues and demoted him to a junior faculty member. In 2019, the school announced that it would not be renewing Dr. Josephson’s contract, a highly unusual decision that practically equates to the firing of Dr. Josephson. On March 28, 2019, Dr. Josephson filed a Complaint in the Western District of Kentucky alleging retaliation by the university in violation of the First Amendment.

A long-standing employment dispute between Dr. Klaassen and the University of Kansas Medical Center (KUMC) eventually turned into a contentious lawsuit. Dr. Klaassen, a long-time tenured professor at the university, claimed that the university retaliated against him in violation of the First Amendment for various comments, outbursts, and other speech made over his decades as a professor. The school placed Dr. Klaassen on administrative leave multiple times and eventually terminated his employment based on his erratic behavior and speech. The District Court of Kansas held that Dr. Klaassen’s alleged “speech” was not protected by the First Amendment, granting summary judgment to KUMC. Dr. Klaassen appealed the decision to the Tenth Circuit on October 30, 2018.

David Demers, a professor at Washington State University (“WSU”), alleged that university administrators took punitive actions towards him–such as a disciplinary warning–in retaliation of Demers’ distribution of his personal writings. After eight-years of litigation, the Ninth Circuit eventually held that such writings related to a matter of public concern and were therefore eligible for protection under the First Amendment, subject to further fact-finding at the District Court. Following this decision, Demers settled with the defendants for $120,000.