The Supreme Court's brief dalliance in CBOCS West, Inc. with employee-friendly jurisprudence ended only days later on June 9 with the release of Engquist v. Oregon Department of Agriculture. In Engquist, the Court dealt with the "class of one" theory of discrimination law, described best in Village of Willowbrook v. Olech, that requires government to have at least a rational basis when it singles out a person or a group of people for unfavorable treatment. In Engquist, the Court held that the "class of one" theory has no applicability in the public employment context.

Engquist continues the Court's emerging view that public employees should have no more and no less rights than private employees, and that the status of the public employer as a governmental body is pretty much irrelevant to employment issues. That view coalesced most clearly in the holding in Garcetti v. Ceballos that public employees don't have any significant free speech rights. One can cavil at the rationale of the Court -- statements in Engquist like "public employees typically have a variety of protections from just the sort of personnel actions about which Engquist complains" ignores the fact that many public employees simply have no such protections -- but the fact is that the Court's approach to public employment rights is no doubt here to stay for many years. The inevitable result will be even a further turn by plaintiffs lawyers away from the federal courts in public employment cases, and more of a resort to state constitutional and statutory theories and collective bargaining rights.