## Facts

- Faculty members and one employee at the State University of New York at Buffalo faced termination or threatened termination for refusing to comply with loyalty certificate/oath requirements tied to New York’s public-education employment rules.
- New York Education Law § 3021 authorized dismissal for “treasonable or seditious” utterances or acts.
- New York Civil Service Law § 105(3) linked “treasonable” and “seditious” conduct to Penal Law definitions (including “criminal anarchy”) and disqualified public employees who advocated or aided advocacy of the forceful overthrow of government.
- New York Education Law § 3022 (the Feinberg Law) directed the Board of Regents to issue implementing regulations, list “subversive organizations,” and treat membership in a listed organization as *prima facie* evidence of disqualification.
- The Regents listed the national and state Communist Parties as “subversive organizations.”
- Appellants filed a federal action seeking declaratory and injunctive relief, alleging the statutory and regulatory scheme was facially unconstitutional under the First Amendment for vagueness and overbreadth.
- A three-judge federal district court upheld the scheme and dismissed the complaint; the Supreme Court reversed.

## Issues

1. Whether New York’s teacher-loyalty statutory and regulatory scheme was unconstitutionally vague, given its use of terms such as “treasonable” and “seditious,” when applied to academic employment.
2. Whether provisions treating membership in listed “subversive” organizations as grounds for disqualification were unconstitutionally overbroad by penalizing association without requiring proof of specific unlawful intent.
3. Whether the First Amendment, including special protection for academic freedom, limits a state’s power to condition public university employment on loyalty standards framed in broad or indeterminate terms.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court reversed the district court and held the New York scheme unconstitutional in a 5–4 decision.
- The Court ruled that the statutes and regulations were unconstitutionally vague and overbroad, particularly in the context of academic employment.
- The Court concluded that the scheme failed to define prohibited conduct and association with the required narrow specificity and chilled protected expression.
- The Court rejected reliance on *Adler v. Board of Education* as controlling, reasoning that later doctrine undercut *Adler*’s approach and that the vagueness problems were not resolved by that precedent.

## Legal Principles

- Vagueness review is especially strict when a law touches free expression; unclear standards that make individuals guess at what is forbidden risk chilling protected speech.
- The First Amendment does not permit public employment rules that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom; academic freedom is a special First Amendment concern.
- Overbreadth doctrine prohibits rules that sweep in protected association; mere membership in an organization cannot be penalized without a constitutionally sufficient showing, including specific intent where association has both lawful and unlawful aims.
- Government regulation of expressive activity in this area must be drawn with narrow specificity and must target specific unlawful conduct or advocacy rather than indeterminate categories.

## Conclusion

The Court invalidated New York’s teacher-loyalty framework because its vague definitions and broad membership-based disqualifications chilled speech and association, and because First Amendment protections—particularly academic freedom—bar conditioning public university employment on such indeterminate loyalty standards.


Keyishian v. Bd. of Regents, 385 U.S. 589 (1967)