Eleventh Circuit strikes down Florida's Stop WOKE Act restrictions on college instruction

A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that Florida cannot dictate what professors teach about race and gender in public university classrooms, striking down key provisions of the state's Stop WOKE Act in a 2-1 decision that landed with an unusual twist: the majority opinion came from a Trump-appointed judge.

Judge Britt Grant, writing for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, called the law "a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse" in the very institutions Florida's own statutes recognize as centers of inquiry. The ruling upheld a lower-court injunction and dealt a significant blow to a signature piece of Gov. Ron DeSantis's legislative agenda, one that conservatives had championed as a necessary check on ideological indoctrination in higher education.

The decision leaves supporters of the law with a hard question: if the First Amendment means anything inside a college classroom, does a state legislature get to decide which ideas professors may discuss and which ones they may not?

What the Stop WOKE Act did, and what the court said about it

DeSantis signed the Stop Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees Act in 2022. The law prohibited public universities, K-12 schools, and private workplaces from promoting certain concepts related to racism, gender, and systemic privilege. It barred instruction suggesting that certain ethnic groups are inherently racist or that discrimination is acceptable to achieve diversity, as Newsmax reported.

Courts blocked the higher-education provisions almost immediately. A lower court had previously called the law "positively dystopian," according to Breitbart's account of the legal history. The Eleventh Circuit's ruling Tuesday went further, finding the law unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds as applied to public colleges and universities.

Tuesday's decision did not address the law's application to K-12 schools or private workplaces. Those provisions remain a separate legal question.

A Trump appointee writes the majority

The panel's composition made the ruling harder for the law's defenders to dismiss as activist overreach. Grant, appointed by President Trump, wrote the majority opinion. Judge Charles R. Wilson, a Clinton appointee, joined her. Judge Barbara Lagoa, also a Trump appointee, dissented alone.

Grant's opinion framed the case in stark First Amendment terms. She wrote that the law "runs headlong into the Supreme Court's repeated, if imprecise, endorsements of academic freedom," adding:

"If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it."

The majority found that Florida had attempted to evade constitutional limits by reclassifying professors' speech as government speech. The Washington Examiner reported that Grant wrote the state sought "to evade any First Amendment limitations at all by rigging together several speech doctrines to create a new rule that would quietly remove all free speech protections from the classroom."

That is a pointed accusation from a judge appointed by the same president whose political allies pushed the legislation.

The dissent's case for state authority

Lagoa's dissent took a fundamentally different view of who controls what happens inside a state-funded classroom. She argued the majority had created its own form of the very problem it claimed to solve:

"The majority's rule, meant to avoid what it believes is the State's improper viewpoint discrimination, nonetheless endorses its own form of viewpoint discrimination."

She added that "some amount of viewpoint discrimination is necessary to ensure the effective operation of any academic institution." In her view, the state and its governing administration retain the authority to set curriculum and speech limits inside classrooms they fund and operate.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier made clear where the state's sympathies fell. After the opinions dropped, he posted on X describing Lagoa as someone who "may be the best jurist in our country." Courts across the country have increasingly become the battleground where judges block government actions that test constitutional boundaries, and this case fits squarely in that pattern.

The conservative case against the Stop WOKE Act

Here is where honest conservatives need to reckon with an uncomfortable reality. The instinct behind the Stop WOKE Act was sound. Public universities have become hotbeds of ideological conformity, where entire departments treat critical race theory and gender ideology as settled truth rather than debatable propositions. Taxpayers who fund these institutions have every right to object when their money subsidizes political indoctrination masquerading as scholarship.

But the tool Florida chose, a state law telling professors which viewpoints they may and may not express, is the same tool the left would use to silence conservative speech if given the chance. And the Eleventh Circuit, with two Republican-appointed judges on the panel, said so plainly.

The National Review noted that the court found the law attempted to "control speech by recharacterizing it as conduct," with financial penalties the court deemed punitive. That framing should alarm anyone who values limited government. If Florida can ban professors from expressing certain ideas about race, what stops California from banning professors who question gender ideology or challenge affirmative action?

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which filed the original 2022 lawsuit that sparked this challenge, celebrated the ruling. FIRE senior attorney Greg H. Greubel put the stakes plainly:

"Today's important decision means that college remains a place where professors and students are allowed to debate controversial topics, even if politicians disagree with them."

Greubel added: "Today's ruling makes clear something we've known for a long time: Governments cannot censor their way to freedom."

That second line should resonate with conservatives who have spent years fighting campus speech codes, trigger warnings, and progressive efforts to define disagreement as harm. The principle does not change because the censor wears a red jersey instead of a blue one.

What the ruling does not resolve

Tuesday's decision leaves significant questions unanswered. The ruling addressed only the Stop WOKE Act's application to public colleges and universities. Its restrictions on K-12 schools and private workplaces remain separate legal matters, and the court did not touch them.

Whether Florida will appeal, potentially seeking en banc review by the full Eleventh Circuit or petitioning the Supreme Court, remains unclear. Uthmeier's pointed praise of Lagoa's dissent suggests the state is not ready to accept this outcome quietly. Florida has shown a willingness to fight legal battles through multiple rounds, as recent political confrontations in the state have demonstrated.

The ACLU, ACLU of Florida, and the Legal Defense Fund were also involved in the legal challenges that led to Tuesday's ruling. ACLU senior staff attorney Leah Watson said the decision "sets a strong precedent that higher education cannot be limited to the whims of politicians."

The procedural posture of the case, whether this was a final ruling on the merits or an affirmation of a preliminary injunction, is not entirely clear from available reporting. That distinction matters for how much weight the decision carries going forward.

The right way to fight campus ideology

None of this means conservatives should stop fighting the ideological capture of higher education. The problem is real. Universities that once prized intellectual diversity now enforce progressive orthodoxy through hiring practices, mandatory DEI trainings, and social pressure that punishes dissent. Taxpayers deserve better from institutions they fund.

But the answer is not to hand state legislatures the power to police classroom speech. That power, once created, will inevitably be turned against the people who created it. The progressive left would love nothing more than a legal framework that lets government officials decide which ideas professors may express.

The better tools are the ones conservatives already know: transparency requirements that expose how universities spend public money, governing board appointments that prioritize intellectual diversity, funding conditions tied to viewpoint neutrality rather than viewpoint bans, and robust protections for students and faculty who dissent from campus orthodoxy. Federal enforcement priorities have also shifted in ways that affect how institutions balance political pressures against institutional obligations.

Lagoa's dissent raises a legitimate point about who governs state institutions. But Grant's majority opinion asks the more fundamental question: once a state starts deciding which ideas are too dangerous for a college classroom, where does it stop? The history of the First Amendment suggests it doesn't.

Conservatives who have long argued that the rule of law matters more than political convenience should take this ruling seriously, not as a defeat, but as a reminder that the principles we defend must apply even when we don't like the result.

If the right wants to win the battle for the American university, it will have to do it the hard way, by building better institutions, not by handing politicians the speech-police badge conservatives have spent decades trying to take away from the left.