A federal appeals court has again blocked Florida from enforcing classroom speech restrictions in the law once sold as the “Stop WOKE Act” and later renamed the “Individual Freedom Act.” For public university professors and students, the ruling keeps the state out of a place it badly wanted to police: the content of classroom discussion.
The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals left in place an injunction against the law after professors and other plaintiffs challenged Florida’s limits on classroom speech. The 85-page decision rejected the state’s theory that because Florida pays public university instructors, it may control what they say while teaching.
According to the court, Florida could not point to an existing First Amendment doctrine that supported that theory. The state instead tried to combine public-employee speech precedent with government-speech doctrine. The court described the result as a proposed rule under which paying a professor’s salary gives the government “total control” over classroom speech.
The majority did not buy it. In the court’s words, Florida’s “salary-for-speech rule” was a “breathtaking assertion of power” to keep disfavored ideas out of public university classrooms. The panel said that if the First Amendment protects public university teaching at all, Florida’s statute crosses the line.
The law targeted instruction on topics including race, equity and LGBTQ+ issues, according to challenges described in the litigation. Florida defended the restrictions as a way to protect what it called its “most cherished ideals.” The appeals court said the state has other ways to promote its own views, but “puppeteering every university professor in the state is not one of them.”
The ruling follows earlier defeats for the law in federal court. Two lawsuits brought by different plaintiffs produced injunctions blocking enforcement. In 2022, one federal judge compared Florida’s First Amendment position to the “upside down” from Stranger Things, writing that the state appeared to believe private actors were constrained by the First Amendment while the government was free to burden speech. In another order, the same court called the law’s treatment of university teaching “positively dystopian.”
Florida appealed those orders. In March 2023, the Eleventh Circuit refused to lift an injunction. After further emergency-style attempts by the state, the court directed its clerk to treat any motion for reconsideration as a non-emergency matter.
The appeals court has also already blocked a separate part of the same Florida law that sought to regulate speech in private workplaces, including mandatory meetings that promoted views state lawmakers disliked. The latest decision addresses the public university classroom provisions, where Florida argued that professors’ in-class speech belonged to the government.
Judge Barbara Lagoa dissented in a separate opinion running more than 30 pages. She argued that the plaintiffs should not have been granted standing or relief, and relied in part on statements from Justice Samuel Alito. The dissent does not change the result: the injunction remains in place.
Florida has said it will appeal. Unless a higher court intervenes, the state cannot enforce these classroom speech restrictions against public university professors.
This story draws on original reporting from Techdirt.