US appeals court strikes down key part of Florida law restricting campus race and gender discussions

Ron DeSantis gives a statement when reporters ask him a question during a press conference on 1 July in Tampa, Florida. Photograph: Jefferee Woo/Tampa Bay Times/Zuma Press Wire/Shutterstock View image in fullscreen Ron DeSantis gives a statement when reporters ask him a question during a press conference on 1 July in Tampa, Florida. Photograph: Jefferee Woo/Tampa Bay Times/Zuma Press Wire/Shutterstock US appeals court strikes down key part of Florida law restricting campus race and gender discussions Ron DeSantis’s Stop Woke Act suffers another legal setback, with the state accused of ‘puppeteering’ Sign up for the Breaking News US newsletter email A federal appeals panel struck down a significant chunk of Ron DeSantis ’s so-called Stop Woke Act on Tuesday, delivering another rebuff to the Republican Florida governor’s efforts to stifle free speech in higher education. In a scathing order, judges of the 11th circuit court of appeal said by a 2-1 majority that the higher education component of the law – which prevented college and university professors teaching or sharing thoughts on concepts of race and gender – breached the free expression rights guaranteed under the US constitution’s first amendment. It accused the state of “puppeteering”: making the educators their mouthpieces by controlling what they can say or teach. “Because the government pays the professors’ salaries, Florida says, their speech is the state’s speech,” Britt Grant, a Donald Trump-appointed judge who wrote the majority opinion, said. “Emphatically no. “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.” It added: “The ideas Florida targets may well be noxious. Or maybe not. Either way, in this context the first amendment trusts students to figure it out for themselves.” The ruling removes a flagship element of DeSantis’s second-term agenda aimed at perceived leftwing ideology on Florida’s state-run higher education campuses. Passed in 2022, the Stop Woke Act, formally branded the Individual Freedom Act, restricted how race and gender could be taught in schools and colleges, and discussed in the workplace. Tuesday’s decision mirrors the same appeals court’s 2024 ruling blocking the workplace provision of the law on the grounds that the state was attempting, unconstitutionally, to recharacterize protected free speech as conduct it could ban. It reinforces a district court’s November 2022 injunction against implementation of the law at Florida’s colleges and universities – and represents a considerable victory for civil rights and free speech advocacy groups that launched the legal action. The lawsuit’s named plaintfill – LeRoy Pernell, a professor at Florida A&M University’s college of law – welco