In a major legal defeat for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s conservative legislative agenda, a federal appeals court has permanently blocked the state from enforcing the higher education provisions of the controversial 2022 Individual Freedom Act, popularly known as the “Stop WOKE Act.”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit delivered a stinging 2-1 decision that firmly rejected the state’s argument that classroom instruction by public university professors constitutes government-controlled speech. Legal experts say the ruling establishes a monumental precedent for academic freedom and constitutional protections on college campuses nationwide.
Writing for the majority, U.S. Circuit Judge Britt C. Grant offered an uncompromising defense of the First Amendment, directly dismantling Florida’s attempts to control university lectures. Judge Grant wrote that the state’s defense relied on an astonishingly broad interpretation of public-employee speech doctrines to justify a sweeping restriction.
“Finding none, it tried to marry public-employee speech cases with government speech doctrine, resulting in a new rule: if the government pays a professor’s salary, it has total control over her classroom speech,” Grant wrote. “Florida’s salary-for-speech rule is a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse in the very places the State’s own statutes recognize as centers of inquiry—classrooms where students are trusted to puzzle through ideas that are good and bad, easy and hard, ideally getting ever closer to the truth.”
The litigation, consolidated primarily under the case Pernell v. Lamb, was originally filed in late 2022 by a coalition of educators and students represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the ACLU of Florida, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF). The law targeted eight specific concepts related to race, gender, privilege, and systemic inequality. Under the statute, university faculty were barred from “promoting” or “endorsing” these ideas, with non-compliant institutions risking the loss of millions of dollars in state performance funding, and individual professors facing immediate termination.
The state had argued that the law was a benign attempt to protect students from discrimination and emotional distress in the classroom. When signing the bill four years ago, Governor DeSantis famously proclaimed, “In Florida, we will not let the far-left woke agenda take over our schools and workplaces. There is no place for indoctrination or discrimination in Florida.”
However, the 11th Circuit majority, which included Judge Grant, a Trump appointee, and Judge Charles Wilson, a Clinton appointee, strongly pushed back against the notion that encountering challenging concepts amounts to discrimination. Instead, they argued that the First Amendment exists precisely to safeguard the friction of competing ideas.
“The ideas Florida targets may well be noxious. Or maybe not,” Judge Grant writes in the majority opinion. “Either way, in this context, the First Amendment trusts students to figure it out for themselves. The State asks us to consider its rules a means of targeting discrimination. But hearing an idea you disagree with is not discrimination; it is an opportunity to come up with a better idea, or maybe even change your mind.”
The court further noted that the state’s mechanism of allowing professors to escape termination by retroactively altering their lectures under threat of punishment was a deeply flawed framework, with Grant noting, “What a remarkable suggestion—that we should bless an unclear, viewpoint-based speech ban simply because the government says it will refrain from penalizing the speaker until after it gives a warning. That is a dark kind of mercy.”
The ruling was celebrated as an existential victory by the educators who stood as plaintiffs in the lawsuit, many of whom reported feeling heavily censored and intimidated since the law’s passage. LeRoy Pernell, a professor at the Florida A&M University College of Law and the lead plaintiff in the case, expressed immense relief over the panel’s decision.
“We are thrilled the court has stopped the erasure of topics that have real implications for our students, allowing them to learn, discuss, and develop tools for combatting the complex issue of racism in our country without being gagged by those who would dictate that only state-approved thought may be promoted,” Pernell says in a statement.
Adriana Novoa, a history professor at the University of South Florida who was also a plaintiff in a parallel challenge backed by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), emphasized the personal toll the legislation had taken on faculty members across the state.
“This decision is such a relief to professors who care about their students and want them to become well-rounded and informed,” Novoa states. “It will allow me and countless other professors to teach our classes without government interference. As a professor, I shouldn’t have to choose between teaching to the best of my ability or facing punishment.”
Civil rights attorneys involved in the case noted that the ruling comes at a crucial historical juncture, as more than 30 states have weighed or introduced similar legislation aimed at regulating higher education curricula. Leah Watson, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program, emphasized that the decision will serve as a defensive shield for academic institutions across the country.
“This ruling sets a strong precedent that higher education cannot be limited to the whims of politicians,” Watson says. “All students and educators deserve to have a free and open exchange about ideas without government control. Students can’t fight racial discrimination that they don’t see; training and instruction is key to empowering future leaders to pursue racial justice.”
In a dissenting opinion, Judge Barbara Lagoa, a DeSantis appointee to the Florida Supreme Court who was later appointed to the 11th Circuit by Trump, argued that the state should retain the authority to regulate what is taught in classrooms funded by taxpayers.
“We need not agree or disagree with Florida that the viewpoints at issue here constitute racial discrimination; we need only acknowledge that the State is allowed to decide what is endorsed by its professors in its own classrooms,” Lagoa wrote.
While the ruling leaves the Stop WOKE Act intact for Florida’s K-12 public schools, which are governed under a different legal framework regarding secondary education curricula, it completely solidifies the block against its enforcement in higher education. The appellate court concluded its historic ruling with a stark warning regarding the boundaries of legislative interference in public universities.
“If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it,” the majority concludes. “We share the dissent’s view that the federal courts do not police curriculum. But we do police the First Amendment. And if the history of that Amendment tells us anything, it is that the government cannot forbid what it perceives as heresy.”
