678
Opinion of O'Connor, J.
conducted. It should, however, be the care that a reasonable manager would use before making an employment decision—discharge, suspension, reprimand, or whatever else— of the sort involved in the particular case. Justice Scalia correctly points out that such care is normally not constitutionally required unless the employee has a protected property interest in her job, post, at 688; see also Board of Regents of State Colleges v. Roth, 408 U. S. 564, 576-578 (1972); but we believe that the possibility of inadvertently punishing someone for exercising her First Amendment rights makes such care necessary.
Of course, there will often be situations in which reasonable employers would disagree about who is to be believed, or how much investigation needs to be done, or how much evidence is needed to come to a particular conclusion. In those situations, many different courses of action will necessarily be reasonable. Only procedures outside the range of what a reasonable manager would use may be condemned as unreasonable.
Petitioners argue that Mt. Healthy City Bd. of Ed. v. Doyle, 429 U. S. 274 (1977), forecloses a reasonableness test, and holds instead that the First Amendment was not violated unless " 'the defendant[s'] intent [was] to violate the plaintiff['s] constitutional rights.' " Brief for Petitioners 25; see also post, at 690 (Scalia, J., dissenting). Justice Scalia makes a similar argument based on Pickering, Con-nick, and Perry, which alluded to the impropriety of management "retaliation" for protected speech. Post, at 689. But in all those cases the employer assertedly knew the true content of the employee's protected speech, and fired the employee in part because of it. In none of them did we have occasion to decide what should happen if the defendants hold an erroneous and unreasonable belief about what plaintiff said. These cases cannot be read as foreclosing an argument that they never dealt with. United States v. L. A. Tucker Truck Lines, Inc., 344 U. S. 33, 38 (1952).
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