could also serve to demonstrate sufficient disruption to the employer's operation that a firing could be justified?" Bisbee conceded that it could, but "it seems to me there has got to be some reasonable basis for thinking that the speech was doing that." How, he was later asked, could the Seventh Circuit's holding that an employer could be held liable for adverse action against speech believed to be unprotected but later held otherwise be reconciled with qualified immunity? "Number one, I disagree with that," he said. "Unfortunately that's the question cert was granted on", came the reply. Bisbee insisted that the record did not support that reading, that it was merely a dictum and that he himself had not so argued. When pressed about this again later, some sharp exchanges resulted. Bisbee said "the Court doesn't even really need to reach that question". "Suppose we think we need to reach that decision" he was told. "[W]e didn't take this case to determine who said what in the cafeteria. We determine this case to see what the rule of law ought to be if an employer acts on reasonable, substantiated information, but is wrong." Bisbee suggested that the Seventh Circuit had perhaps used "language that was broader than it needed to", to which O'Connor responded that it might need to be sent back since even he declined to defend their legal theory. "It seems to me that you can affirm the judgment and say that the legal test employed by the Seventh Circuit was not altogether correct," he proposed. Decision The Court announced its decision May 31, 1994. Seven justices had agreed to vacate the Seventh Circuit and remand the case to district court for a determination of what exactly Churchill was fired for. Three justices joined Sandra Day O'Connor in a plurality opinion. David Souter, a member of that plurality, added a concurrence of his own. Antonin Scalia wrote a separate concurrence, joined by two other justices. John Paul Stevens wrote for himself and Harry Blackmun that the First Amendment was important enough that Churchill was entitled to the trial she sought to determine what she said. Majority The plurality, joined by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, held that the appeals court had proposed a test too onerous to the government to be broadly applied, but agreed that there was enough of a factual dispute