Jeffrey Patti

Sparta, New Jersey-based attorney Jeffrey Patti has represented plaintiffs and defendants in all manner of civil and criminal suits. Prior to joining his current firm, Patti & Patti, Esqs., Jeffrey Patti participated in a case of significant constitutional importance. At issue in the 2000 lawsuit, Green Township Education Association v. Rowe, was the School Board’s policy regarding campaigning by teachers on school property. Jeffrey Patti and his colleagues learned that during a labor dispute between the Board and the labor union, teachers began wearing buttons bearing the message “NJEA Settle Now,” during classroom hours and in front of students. The court, writing in a decision deemed important enough for publication, considered New Jersey’s constitutional standards for facial challenges to laws, and the impact the government’s status as an employer of public school faculty had on the teachers’ freedom of speech while working. The court concluded that the no-campaigning policy, as written, was overbroad insofar as it prevented political campaign activities among teachers outside of school hours and outside of the presence of students. Jeffrey Patti and his colleagues, however, rebuffed arguments by plaintiffs to strike down the policy in its entirety, despite First Amendment law backing the facial challenges to overbroad governmental policy. Preventing outright invalidation of the policy, Jeffrey Patti and his co-counsel managed to win victory on the key issue in dispute, when the court concluded that wearing political buttons in the classroom would disrupt schools’ educational goals and thus, forbidding this action was not unconstitutional. In the legal briefs, Jeffrey Patti stressed the employer-employee aspect of this dispute, which distinguished it from ordinary free speech cases, finding that failure to prohibit the practice carried a risk of impairing student performance. The court found that prohibiting authority figures’ display of political buttons before captive audiences while allowing student-initiated discussions about labor disputes or political topics would best promote free and balanced speech in the classroom.