[Moose Burger]

"If you find for the plaintiff but find no damages..." It's kind of weird. The jury is saying "yes, the plaintiff's right, but the University did nothing wrong against him (i.e. they either were right on firing him, or wrongly firing someone doesn't cause any harm...), so he doesn't deserve any compensation)". I think the jury didn't really want to set on that veredict, but they wanted to "stick it to The Man™" anyway.

[keepitreal]

In these civil rights cases, if the jury finds that his rights were violated, they must find for him. If they find that such violations did not cause him actual economic damage, they must award at least $1.

My bet is the jury thought his free speech rights were violated when CU started poking around his file after his comments. Then, when they found something that led to his firing, that was of his own doing, so he deserved no monetary award. So they gave him $1 for the poking around in his file after he exercised his free speech rights.