A Las Vegas police officer who opposes the local police union is asking the Supreme Court to review her claim that the bargaining unit illegally extracted dues money from her paycheck.
The case is one in a series of lawsuits that have arisen in light of the Supreme Court’s landmark 2018 ruling in Janus v. AFSCME, a decision that threw a wrench in how unions finance their operations. In that decision, the high court held, among other things, that public-sector workers have a constitutionally protected First Amendment right to refuse to join or subsidize a union.
The court reasoned, in the words of Justice Samuel Alito, that compelling non-union workers to fork over union dues as an employment condition “violates the free speech rights of nonmembers by compelling them to subsidize private speech on matters of substantial public concern.”…