## Facts

- Robin Joy Shahar, a recent law school graduate, accepted an offer to work as a Staff Attorney in the Georgia Attorney General’s office.
- On an employment form, Shahar stated she was engaged and identified “Francine Greenfield” as her future spouse.
- Shahar and her partner planned a religious ceremony described by the court as a “Jewish, lesbian feminist, outdoor wedding.”
- After a conversation with an attorney from the office became known to senior officials, concerns were raised that hiring Shahar in light of a publicly known same-sex “marriage” could create problems for the office.
- Attorney General Michael J. Bowers rescinded the job offer, asserting that inaction could be viewed as tacit approval of the purported marriage and could impair office functioning.
- Georgia law at the time did not recognize same-sex marriages.

## Issues

1. Whether rescinding a government job offer because an applicant intended to enter a same-sex “marriage” violated constitutional rights of intimate association, privacy, expressive association, or free exercise.
2. Whether the claim required strict scrutiny as a burden on fundamental rights, or a government-employer balancing test.
3. Whether the State’s asserted interests in the effective functioning and credibility of the Attorney General’s office justified the action under the applicable standard.

## Decision

- The Eleventh Circuit (en banc) affirmed summary judgment for Bowers.
- The court applied a government-employer balancing test rather than strict scrutiny.
- The court held the State’s interest in efficient operation of the Law Department outweighed Shahar’s associational interests in the planned ceremony and relationship.
- After the en banc decision, the court denied a motion to supplement the appellate record with post-judgment reports that Bowers had engaged in an adulterous affair with a Department of Law employee, citing finality and the exceptional nature of record supplementation.

## Legal Principles

- When the government acts as employer, constitutional claims arising from employment decisions may be assessed under a balancing framework weighing employee/applicant interests against the government’s interest in effective public service.
- A court may decline to treat an asserted associational or privacy interest as triggering strict scrutiny in the public-employment context and instead evaluate whether predicted workplace disruption or loss of public confidence justifies the decision.
- Appellate supplementation of the record with extra-record facts is an extraordinary remedy; strong interests in finality and the availability of earlier discovery weigh heavily against reopening the record after judgment.

## Conclusion

The en banc court upheld the rescission of Shahar’s job offer, concluding that, in the government-employer setting, the Attorney General’s asserted interests in office efficiency and effective performance outweighed Shahar’s associational interests related to her planned same-sex marriage ceremony, and it later refused to reopen the record to add post-judgment allegations about the decisionmaker’s private conduct.


Shahar v. Bowers, 114 F.3d 1097 (11th Cir. 1997) (en banc)