due process rights. He could not grant summary judgement on the First Amendment claim since there was a factual dispute in that area, and ordered a status conference to be held the next month with a magistrate. Churchill then moved for summary judgement on the remaining claim, arguing that she had been fired without a determination that she had been engaging in protected speech on a matter of public concern, and that her rights to freedom of association with Dr. Koch had also been abridged, in violation of her due process rights. The defendants cross-moved for the same, arguing failure to state a claim on the free-association claim. They denied she had been engaging in protected speech, and that even if it were, she would still have been fired for undermining the hospital administration. Mihm found Churchill's speech "inherently disruptive". Echoing Perkins-Graham's description of it as a "bitch session", and noting "history of hostility between Churchill and her supervisors", he found she intended "not to inform but rather to gripe." He entered judgement for the defendants. Appeal Churchill then appealed Mihm's ruling to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Koch, whom she married in 1991, joined the case as an appellant, arguing that Waters, Davis and Hopper had tried to have his privileges revoked as retaliation for his role in the incident. A three-judge panel of Richard Dickson Cudahy, John Louis Coffey and Daniel Anthony Manion heard the case in February 1992. Eight months later, they ruled in favor of Churchill. Coffey's opinion considered three issues: whether the district court had properly found Churchill's criticisms of Waters, Davis and cross-training did not touch on a matter of public concern, whether the appellants' failure to determine that before firing her had been a due process violation and whether they were entitled to qualified immunity from the suit since they argued there was no settled law on the subject. To resolve the first issue, he turned to the relevant case law on the subject. In 1968's Pickering v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court had overturned the firing of an Illinois high-school teacher for writing a letter to the editor in a local newspaper critical of the school board's handling of a recent tax increase. That case had established that public employees had First Amendment rights to "comment on matters of public interest in connection with the operations of the public [entity]