The 2-1 ruling came from a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, reports The Christian Post.
Also known as the Individual Freedom Act, the Stop WOKE Act aimed to prohibit public college and university professors from teaching or endorsing eight specific concepts related to race, sex, privilege and systemic inequality.
The appeals court affirmed a lower court's preliminary injunction, ruling that the law's restrictions on classroom instruction unconstitutionally restrict freedom of speech and violate academic freedom protected by the First Amendment.
"Though the government has plenty of ways to promote its own viewpoint, puppeteering every university professor in the state is not one of them," wrote Judge Britt Grant, a Trump appointee, in the majority opinion. "Forcing an official government line — in a college classroom of all places — is exactly the 'pall of orthodoxy' that the First Amendment will not tolerate."
Grant added that Florida's 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.
"The ideas Florida targets may well be noxious, or maybe not," wrote Grant. "Either way, in this context the First Amendment trusts students to figure it out for themselves."
Grant then wrote that there is nothing ordinary about the authority Florida is seeking with the Stop WOKE Act.
The total level of control that Florida demands would be "inconsistent not only with our Nation's traditional constitutional protections for academic freedom," but also with the doctrines Florida "cobbles together to support its suppression" of disfavored viewpoints.
"If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it," wrote Grant.
According to The Hill, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and America Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), both involved in the legal challenges, believed this to be a win for academic freedom.
Jenna Ellis is a legal expert who lives in Florida and the radio host of AFR’s “Jenna Ellis in the Morning.” She told AFN that the majority got the Stop WOKE Act ruling wrong.
"The First Amendment is not a catchall to say that any speech in any context can never be prohibited," Ellis says.
Judge Barbara Lagoa, a Trump appointee, was the only judge out of three that did not agree with ruling, believing that it supports its own form of viewpoint discrimination while trying to avoid it.
Ellis pointed out that the Stop WOKE Act was not about discrimination.
"It was actually anti-discrimination, to say that professors and educators in these classrooms can't tell certain demographics — like, specifically white people — that you are responsible and should carry guilt for some sort of oppression in a Marxist kind of worldview regime," Ellis says.
Florida can appeal the ruling. The state could request an en banc review that would involve the entire Eleventh Circuit hearing the case. They could also appeal directly to the U.S. Supreme Court.
