A federal appeals panel has blocked the higher education piece of Florida’s Stop WOKE Act in a 2-1 decision, finding the statute runs into First Amendment problems while Gov. Ron DeSantis pushed back publicly. The ruling, written by Judge Britt Grant of the Eleventh Circuit, came in lawsuits brought by professors, students, and a student group and landed on one of Florida’s most visible culture-war efforts.

The court’s opinion targeted the law’s restrictions on classroom speech and found them unconstitutional. That opinion came from a judge appointed by President Trump and cut directly into the governor’s signature education policy.

Professor and student plaintiffs argued the 2022 law amounted to censorship of classroom instruction, and the appeals court agreed with key constitutional objections. The dispute emerged from two separate suits that challenged the statute’s limits on what faculty can say in public university classrooms.

DeSantis reacted forcefully on X, calling the decision an overreach and insisting the state must protect students from ideological instruction. His quick response signaled he sees the ruling as part of a bigger fight over who controls public education.

Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, passed in 2022, forbade professors and workplace trainers from teaching about race or gender in ways that induce guilt or blame and attached penalties for violations. The statute targeted eight concepts relating to race and sex, an enumeration that became central to the lawsuit over whether the law sweeps too broadly.

The governor’s office defended the law as a safeguard for open inquiry and framed it as protection against forced ideology, saying it “protects the open exchange of ideas by prohibiting teachers or employers who hold agency over others from forcing discriminatory concepts on students as