{"id":332438,"date":"2026-07-07T23:05:07","date_gmt":"2026-07-07T23:05:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/332438\/"},"modified":"2026-07-07T23:05:07","modified_gmt":"2026-07-07T23:05:07","slug":"appeals-court-rules-florida-stop-woke-act-violates-free-speech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/332438\/","title":{"rendered":"Appeals court rules Florida Stop WOKE Act violates free speech"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida speaks during a roundtable event in March in the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C. On Tuesday, a U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the De-Santis-championed Stop WOKE Act violates free speech. File Photo by Aaron Schwartz\/UPI | License Photo<\/a><\/p>\n

July 7 (UPI) — A federal panel of appeals court judges ruled Tuesday that the Stop WOKE Act championed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis violates the free speech of professors and is a “breathtaking assertion of power.”<\/p>\n

The Florida law restricted how professors can teach, especially when speaking about gender and race, in colleges and universities. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled 2-1 to support a 2022 decision that called the law “positively dystopian,” Politico reported.<\/a>\n<\/p>\n

The court Tuesday went further, saying the act is<\/a> 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.”<\/p>\n

“If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it,” the ruling said.<\/p>\n

Judge Britt C. Grant wrote the opinion, joined by Judge Charles R. Wilson. Judge Barbara Lagoa, however, wrote a dissent saying the First Amendment “does not compel all viewpoints to be worthy of state-sponsored endorsement.”\n<\/p>\n

The Florida Legislature approved the act, also called the Individual Freedom Act, in 2022. The state has been fighting it in court ever since.<\/p>\n

The lawsuits that led to the ruling Tuesday were brought by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a student free-speech group, and the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Florida and Legal Defense Fund.<\/p>\n

FIRE senior attorney Greg Greubel said the decision “means that college remains a place where professors and students are allowed to debate controversial topics — even if politicians disagree with them.”<\/p>\n

DeSantis’ office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday, Politico said. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier praised Lagoa on social media<\/a>, saying she “may be the best jurist in our country” and should be on the U.S. Supreme Court<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida speaks during a roundtable event in March in the East Room of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":332439,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[137137,28,30,29,4495,99,412,4497,278,4494],"class_list":["post-332438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-florida","tag-charles-r","tag-florida","tag-florida-headlines","tag-florida-news","tag-law-and-crime","tag-politics","tag-ron-desantis","tag-supreme-court","tag-top-stories","tag-u-s"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=332438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332438\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/332439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=332438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=332438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=332438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}