up O'Connor's question about the unique nature of government employment that allows the lower constitutional obligation. Looking over older Supreme Court jurisprudence on the subject, he observed that "Employees who are appointed in the federal service act as agents of the sovereign and thereby accept both the powers and the obligations imposed on the sovereign itself. To enable our government to function properly and to promote the public good, federal employees must be under stricter authority of the sovereign than private citizen[s]." He found its source in the authority of the government over military personnel. While civilian employees enjoyed greater liberty than soldiers, the Court had ruled they were both under the same authority. For most of the country's history, Hemingway wrote, federal employees were appointees, employed at will, with no legal recourse against adverse actions due to the federal government's sovereign immunity. That began to change in the late 19th century with the Pendleton Act. Over the course of the 20th century Congress expanded the protections of federal employees, to the point that by the 1990s they had the same legal recourse against discrimination as employees in the private sector, with five separate administrative agencies empowered to hear employee complaints and grant relief. Those rights have come with restrictions private workers are not subject to. In the late 1930s Congress passed the Hatch Act, limiting political activity by federal employees, and it has been upheld by the Supreme Court on several occasions. Federal employees, though in some cases unionized, are also not allowed to strike, a restriction upheld by a district court. The 1978 Ethics in Government Act imposed other restrictions on federal employees that sometimes go beyond the term of their employment. Lastly, the federal government's sovereign immunity means it can only be sued where such actions are permitted by statute. He reviewed actions of the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), the administrative body that hears most claims by federal employees, and the Federal Circuit, which hears appeals from the MSPB and the other agencies, in light of Waters and United States v. National Treasury Employees Union. Recounting the differences between O'Connor and Scalia, he advised federal managers to follow O'Connor's approach pending later jurisprudence. "[I]t is clear that Waters expands federal employee due process rights while attempting to reserve for public managers the ultimate ability to determine whether public employee speech detracts from the Government's ability to