Notice before unpaid suspension

1. Whether, when a public employer suspends a tenured employee without pay, here indefinitely and now for more than seven years, on the strength of coworkers’ accusations, the pre-suspension “notice of the charges” and “explanation of the employer’s evidence” required by Cleveland Board of Education v. Loudermill, 470 U.S. 532, 546 (1985), and applied to suspensions in Schmidt v. Creedon, 639 F.3d 587 (3d Cir. 2011), must disclose who the accusers are and what the employee is alleged to have said or done wrong; and whether meetings at which the employer withholds both, citing a local confidentiality policy, satisfy due process under the Fourteenth Amendment. 2. Whether it violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments for a public employer to invoke a harassment policy’s confidentiality clause both to withhold from an employee the identity of her accusers and the substance of the accusations, and to forbid and punish her efforts to gather witnesses and character evidence in her own defense, and then for state courts to seal from the public record the allegations unrelated to the unlawful harassment policy. 3. Whether a court may dismiss her retaliation and association claims on the pleadings by treating the employer’s own charging document as proof that it would have acted anyway, contrary to Mt. Healthy City School District Board of Education v. Doyle, 429 U.S. 274 (1977). 4. Whether a state court may dismiss a public employee’s § 1983 due process claims as untimely under a state open-meetings statute’s 30-day limit, or because a union-controlled grievance arbitration was incomplete, when this Court has held that § 1983 claims are governed by the State’s general personal-injury limitations period, Owens v. Okure, 488 U.S. 235 (1989), and may not be conditioned on state exhaustion or notice requirements, Patsy v. Board of Regents, 457 U.S. 496 (1982); Felder v. Casey, 487 U.S. 131 (1988).