James Tracy v. Florida Atlantic University Board of Trustees, et al.

Florida Atlantic University has a reporting policy that requires its faculty and staff to disclose outside professional activities to the university so that it may determine whether those activities constitute a conflict of interest. FAU used that policy as purported justification to terminate Professor James Tracy for not “disclosing” a notorious and widely criticized personal blog, which questioned the veracity of the Sandy Hook massacre narrative depicted by the government and the media. FAU’s reporting policy incoherently defines professional practice as both compensated and uncompensated activity, does not make any reference to blogging or social media use, and was applied to Professor Tracy even though the policy had never been applied to require the reporting of personal blogs by any of the dozens of other FAU professors who maintain blogs or social media sites. The question presented is: Whether FAU’s conflict-of-interest reporting policy is unconstitutionally vague, impermissibly chills speech, and may be facially challenged because it grants the public university unbridled discretion to engage in content-based viewpoint discrimination against employees like Professor Tracy?