A divided U.S. Court of Appeals panel permanently blocked Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” restrictions as applied to colleges, ruling the law violates the First Amendment by prohibiting professors from expressing certain views about race, gender, and other contested topics. The 2–1 decision keeps the longstanding injunction in place for Florida’s public higher education institutions. The court rejected Florida’s argument that public-university faculty classroom speech constitutes government speech outside First Amendment protections. In the majority opinion, the panel said Florida’s approach would impose an unconstitutional “pall of orthodoxy,” effectively puppeteering professors’ classroom speech. The decision follows multiple higher-education legal challenges to the act that began shortly after the law took effect in 2022. Tuesday’s ruling is expected to reverberate beyond Florida because other states have looked to the measure as a blueprint for restricting instruction in similar areas. For universities, the ruling reduces near-term exposure to the act’s specific college provisions while highlighting the constitutional vulnerability of speech restrictions framed as anti-discrimination safeguards.