## Facts

- Florida enacted the Individual Freedom Act (IFA), regulating instruction and training in public higher education concerning race, national origin, and sex.
- The IFA identified eight disfavored “concepts” and barred university instruction that “espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels belief in” those concepts.
- The IFA and a related Board of Governors regulation allowed only “objective” discussion of the disfavored concepts, framed as discussion without endorsement.
- Public university professors and students sued state higher-education officials and university governing bodies, alleging the law chilled classroom speech and academic instruction.
- Plaintiffs alleged credible risk of discipline, including termination, and submitted evidence of self-censorship and course-content changes.
- The consolidated plaintiffs sought a preliminary injunction to block enforcement of the IFA’s higher-education instructional provisions during the litigation.

## Issues

1. Whether the IFA’s restrictions on classroom instruction in public universities likely constitute unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination under the First Amendment.
2. Whether professors’ classroom instruction may be treated as government-employee speech subject to broad state control under *Garcetti* principles.
3. Whether the IFA’s “objectivity” allowance and related operative terms are unconstitutionally vague in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.
4. Whether plaintiffs satisfied the requirements for preliminary injunctive relief, including likelihood of success, irreparable harm, balance of equities, and public interest.

## Decision

- The court granted in part the motions for a preliminary injunction and enjoined enforcement of the challenged higher-education provisions against the plaintiff professors and their institutions.
- The court held plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits of their First Amendment claim because the IFA functioned as viewpoint-based regulation of classroom speech.
- The court also held plaintiffs were likely to succeed on an independent claim that the statute and regulation were void for vagueness, particularly the “objective discussion” carveout and related undefined terms.
- The court found irreparable harm based on the chilling of First Amendment rights and accepted evidence of self-censorship as a cognizable injury.
- The court concluded the balance of harms and the public interest favored protecting constitutional rights and preventing enforcement of a likely unconstitutional and vague restriction on academic instruction.

## Legal Principles

- Viewpoint discrimination—permitting expression of one side of a debate while suppressing the other—is presumptively unconstitutional under the First Amendment, including in public university classrooms.
- A state may set curriculum and course offerings, but it may not forbid professors from presenting disfavored viewpoints on matters within the established curriculum.
- Public university classroom instruction is not treated as fully scriptable government speech such that the state may impose viewpoint-based prohibitions on faculty teaching.
- A law regulating speech violates due process when it fails to provide fair notice of what is prohibited and invites arbitrary enforcement; vagueness concerns are heightened when core First Amendment activity is chilled.
- Loss of First Amendment freedoms, including self-censorship in response to a credible threat of enforcement, constitutes irreparable injury supporting preliminary injunctive relief.

## Conclusion

The court preliminarily enjoined enforcement of Florida’s higher-education instructional restrictions in the IFA because plaintiffs showed a substantial likelihood that the law imposed viewpoint-based limits on classroom speech and, separately, that its “objective discussion” framework was impermissibly vague, causing self-censorship and irreparable First Amendment harm.


Pernell v. Fla. Bd. of Governors of the State Univ. Sys., 641 F. Supp. 3d 1218 (N.D. Fla. 2022)