Debugging City Hall: The Practical, Ethical, and Litigation Risks of Lindke v. Freed at Two Years

While the Supreme Court’s two-prong test is now familiar, the operational gap between the doctrine and its daily application remains the hard part for municipal counsel. Lindke v. Freed replaced appearance-based reasoning with a structured test: actual authority to speak for the government on the specific matter, and a purported exercise of that authority in the specific post or moderation action. Lower courts are still working out what that test means for individual officials, mixed-use accounts, and the moderation decisions that generate § 1983 claims. This program covers the doctrine, the litigation file it produces, and the practical problem of applying the test at the scale a municipal practice actually faces.

Professor Brian Owsley brings the bench’s reading of Lindke and the academy’s reading of how the lower courts are applying it. He is an author and IMLA presenter on First Amendment and § 1983 doctrine.

Tom Wright brings the operational side: what the litigation file looks like when it arrives, what the ethics rules require when the city attorney is simultaneously defending the municipality and advising the individual official, and how to structure compliance reviews that preserve privilege under model rules 1.6 and 1.13.

Chaz Stevens is the named plaintiff in Stevens v. LaMarca, a § 1983 social-media-blocking matter against an individual state legislator, the post-Lindke fact pattern lower courts are currently working out. He brings the plaintiff’s chair perspective and a structured method for measuring official-account exposure across the Lindke prongs, presented to show defense counsel how a plaintiff maps a municipal digital record before the city knows a claim is brewing.

Speaker: Chaz Stevens, Brian Owsley & Tom Wright