A Trump-appointed federal judge delivered a sharp rebuke to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday, writing for a 2-1 majority on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit that the higher education portion of the governor's signature Stop WOKE Act violates the First Amendment.
Judge Britt Grant, whom President Trump placed on the 11th Circuit during his first term, did not hold back. The ruling blocks the 2022 law's restrictions on what professors may teach about race and gender at Florida's public universities, and calls the state's legal theory for defending those restrictions a dangerous overreach.
The decision lands four years after DeSantis championed the Individual Freedom Act, widely branded the Stop WOKE Act, as a centerpiece of his culture-war agenda. It also arrives long after DeSantis's failed 2024 presidential bid, in which he challenged Trump for the Republican nomination before suspending his campaign and endorsing the president following a distant second-place finish in the Iowa caucuses. The law that was supposed to define DeSantis as a national conservative leader now stands partially dismantled by a judge his former rival appointed.
The 11th Circuit's majority opinion, filed July 7, stems from two lawsuits brought by professors, students, and a student group who argued the law amounted to unconstitutional classroom censorship. The court agreed.
Grant wrote that the Stop WOKE Act "disallows any 'training or instruction that espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels' students at Florida public colleges and universities to believe any of eight concepts relating to topics like race and sex." The state's core defense was that professors' classroom speech belongs to the government because professors draw public salaries.
The court rejected that argument in blunt terms. As the Washington Examiner reported, Grant answered Florida's claim with a single word, "Emphatically no", before calling the state's position a "breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse."
"If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it."
That line from the majority opinion captures the scope of the ruling. The court did not hedge or suggest the law might survive with minor revisions. It treated the higher education provision as a clear First Amendment violation.
This is not the first time the Stop WOKE Act has run into judicial resistance. Federal Judge Mark Walker originally blocked the law in August 2022, shortly after DeSantis signed it. Walker compared the law's effect to the "upside down" from the television show Stranger Things, a comparison that drew attention at the time for its colorful language but also for its substance. The New York Post reported in 2023 that the 11th Circuit denied DeSantis's request to lift that temporary block, leaving the law unable to take effect while appeals continued.
DeSantis's office maintained throughout the process that the law was constitutional. A spokesman said at the time that the court "did not rule on the merits of our appeal" and that the administration remained "confident."
Now the court has ruled on the merits. And the result is worse for Tallahassee than the preliminary injunction ever was. The 11th Circuit's opinion goes further than Walker's original order, treating the law not as a close call but as a textbook free-speech violation.
The ruling also addresses a separate aspect of the law beyond higher education. AP News reported that the same three-judge panel struck down the Stop WOKE Act as it applies to private workplaces, with Grant writing that the law "targets speech based on its content" and "penalizes certain viewpoints, the greatest First Amendment sin."
The workplace portion of the ruling is significant on its own terms. DeSantis's office pushed back, stating, "We disagree with the Court's opinion that employers can require employees to be taught, as a condition of employment, that one race is morally superior to another race." That framing suggests the governor's team may seek further review.
DeSantis responded on X the day after the ruling, calling it "a clear and unfortunate example of judicial overreach." His spokesperson directed inquiries to the post rather than issuing a separate statement, a move that, as Breitbart noted, came after the governor's office initially did not respond to requests for comment, suggesting the decision caught the administration off guard.
DeSantis's full response laid out a straightforward argument for state authority over public university instruction:
"State universities are funded by taxpayers and directed by elected officials and their appointees. The state has both a right and a responsibility to ensure instruction at these universities is consistent with the underlying mission and to exclude indoctrination and ideological agendas."
He added that "Florida was correct to bar CRT and DEI. We also have a right to do so." And he framed the broader fight as one against institutional corruption: "We've seen so many institutions get corrupted by ideology, and universities have been perhaps the most common."
That argument resonates with millions of parents and taxpayers who have watched public universities become incubators for ideological conformity. The frustration DeSantis channeled in 2022 was real and remains real. The question is whether the legal vehicle he chose can survive constitutional scrutiny, and so far, the federal judiciary says it cannot.
There is a genuine conflict at the heart of this case, and conservatives should not pretend otherwise. On one side stands the legitimate concern that taxpayer-funded institutions have become vehicles for left-wing orthodoxy, where dissenting students face social and academic penalties for questioning progressive dogma on race and gender. On the other stands the First Amendment, which does not conveniently pause its protections when the speech in question comes from a professor conservatives find objectionable.
The court's ruling does not mean Florida is powerless. States retain broad authority over university governance, hiring, curriculum standards, accreditation, and funding decisions. DeSantis has demonstrated willingness to use executive and legislative power aggressively on other fronts. But the Stop WOKE Act's approach, banning specific viewpoints from classroom instruction under penalty of law, ran headlong into a constitutional wall that even a Trump-appointed judge could not ignore.
Two of the three judges on the panel, Grant and Andrew Brasher, were Trump appointees. National Review reported that the panel accused the state of attempting to "control speech by recharacterizing it as conduct." That framing matters. It means the court saw Florida not as a state protecting students from discrimination, but as a government trying to regulate ideas by calling them something else.
When DeSantis's office first defended the law in 2022, it argued the Stop WOKE Act "protects the open exchange of ideas by prohibiting teachers or employers who hold agency over others from forcing discriminatory concepts on students." The office added that "an 'open-minded and critical' environment necessitates that one is free from discrimination."
The 11th Circuit was not persuaded that prohibiting specific viewpoints qualifies as protecting open exchange. And that tension, between using state power to counter ideological capture and respecting the constitutional limits on that power, is one conservatives will face again and again as federal courts continue to define the boundaries of government authority over speech.
The ruling leaves several questions unanswered. The specific plaintiffs, the professors, students, and student group who brought the two lawsuits, are not identified in detail. The identity of the dissenting judge in the 2-1 decision remains unclear, as does whether the dissent offered a roadmap for a future appeal. Most critically, neither DeSantis nor his office has stated whether Florida will seek en banc review by the full 11th Circuit or petition the Supreme Court.
Given DeSantis's combative response, further legal action seems likely. The governor has built his political identity around fighting institutional progressivism, and walking away from the Stop WOKE Act's legal defense would undercut that brand. But the path forward is steep. The majority opinion reads less like a narrow procedural ruling and more like a constitutional declaration, one that would require a significant shift in First Amendment doctrine to overturn.
Meanwhile, Florida's courts continue to shape the state's political landscape in ways that sometimes help and sometimes hinder the governor's agenda. That is how the system works. Courts do not exist to ratify any politician's preferences, even when those preferences are popular with the base.
The broader conservative project of reclaiming universities from ideological capture remains urgent. But it will succeed only through tools that the Constitution allows, governance reforms, funding conditions, transparency mandates, and the slow, unglamorous work of holding institutions accountable within the law. Shortcuts that run afoul of the First Amendment do not advance that cause. They set it back.
If conservatives want to win the fight for the university, they need a strategy that can survive a courtroom, not just a campaign rally.
