Olde Hornet
Well-Known Member
TALLAHASSEE, Florida — Florida’s anti-woke law restricting how lessons on race and gender can be taught in colleges and universities — policies championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis — violates the free speech rights of professors, a panel of appeals court judges ruled Tuesday.
The decision from a divided 2-1 panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit is a devastating, possibly final blow to the so-called Stop WOKE Act touted by the DeSantis administration. The judges affirmed a 2022 decision that labeled Florida’s rules as “positively dystopian,” doubling down by arguing the law is “a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse” in the very classroom space where students are supposed to “puzzle through ideas that are good and bad, easy and hard, ideally getting ever closer to the truth.”
“If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it,” Judge Britt C. Grant, an appointee of President Donald Trump, wrote in the opinion.
Grant was joined by Judge Charles R. Wilson, a Bill Clinton appointee, in the ruling. But another Trump-appointed judge, Barbara Lagoa — a former Florida Supreme Court judge picked by DeSantis — wrote a striking dissent of the decision, contending the First Amendment “does not compel all viewpoints to be worthy of state-sponsored endorsement.”
“This panel is not free to rewrite precedent simply because we dislike where it leads,” Lagoa wrote.