WASHINGTON -- Broadly expanding the free-speech rights of nearly 1.7 million federal employees, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday that they have a constitutional right to make money by moonlighting as writers and speakers.
The ruling frees lower-paid, rank-and-file federal workers who do not hold policy-making jobs to receive honorariums for what they say or write outside of work.
A 5-year-old law banning those payments, the court noted, imposes "a blanket burden" on "an immense class of workers with negligible power to confer favors on those who might pay to hear them speak or to read their articles."
The court refused, however, to lift the ban on honorariums for high-level government officials, federal judges and members of Congress and their staffs.
The decision applies to federal workers whose pay grade is below GS-16 -- those making between $12,141 a year and $88,326, a group that totals 1,680,500 workers.
Among federal employees in Maryland who will benefit from the ruling is Robert A. Gordon, 55, an aerospace engineer at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. A physicist who plots the dynamics of space satellite movement, Mr. Gordon lectures in his spare time on black history, focusing on alliances between blacks and Seminole Indian warriors.
"It's a relief," he said of the decision. He said he could not understand why an honorariums ban was needed and why Congress had made it so sweeping. Noting that he has been accepting lecture fees but placing them in bank escrow accounts, he said: "I will withdraw them with ease of conscience now."
Mr. Gordon was one of 11 workers from around the country who joined federal labor unions four years ago in challenging the constitutionality of the honorariums ban in federal court. They won in a federal appeals court, but the government took the dispute on to the Supreme Court. Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote the court's main opinion, said the ban might discourage the development of literary giants. He noted that such authors as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and Bret Harte had worked as federal employees.
The court criticized the patchwork nature of the honorariums ban, noting that it applied to many writing and speaking activities but not to all. For example, the ban does not apply to an employee who takes money for acting in a play, delivering a sermon or writing fiction.
By a 5-4 vote, the court rejected a government request to keep the honorariums ban partially intact by banning them for workers when they write or speak on issues that may be linked to their government work, or take money from someone with an interest in the work of the employee's agency.
Justice Stevens said the majority was unwilling to rewrite the law itself, and thus left Congress to decide whether to try to write a new law applying the ban to workers when their outside activities or their audiences are linked to their work.
The court majority said it was nullifying the honorariums ban for rank-and-file workers partly because of the ban's wide sweep against employees' First Amendment rights, and partly because the government had not proved that it needed to ban workers' pay for outside activities.
Robert M. Tobias, president of the the National Treasury Employees Union, which won the decision, said the "really significant part" of the ruling was that the court required the government to offer hard evidence of a need to limit the First Amendment rights of public employees.
Mr. Tobias, whose union represents 150,000 workers in 18 agencies, said he expected the ruling will provide greater protection for free-speech activities beyond payments for outside writing or speaking. The court, however, gave little sign that it was willing to relax the long-standing ban on federal employees engaging in political activities -- a ban the court upheld in 1947 and has not questioned since.