Alabama asks Supreme Court to uphold Florida’s Stop WOKE Act
The challenge holds the potential to decide the future of Alabama's own anti-diversity, equity and inclusion law.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall co-led an amicus brief with Kentucky, filed on Monday, urging the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold Florida's anti-diversity, equity and inclusion law.
The 13-state brief asks the court to uphold Florida’s Individual Freedom Act, also known as the Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees, or Stop WOKE Act, which prohibits professors at public universities from espousing certain race-based concepts.
The law provides that educators may discuss listed concepts as a part of training or instruction but may not promote or “require” students to believe the concepts.
Concepts listed in the act include “suggesting that a person, by virtue of their race, color, sex, or national origin, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously” and “characterizing merit, excellence, hard work ethics, or colorblindness as inherently racist or sexist.”
A group of public university educators first challenged the Stop WOKE Act in 2022, arguing the law abridged their right to academic freedom under the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
In July, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruled that the law likely violates the First Amendment right to academic freedom, and Florida asked the Supreme Court to review the decision.
The high court has not yet decided whether to hear Florida's appeal.
The Alabama and Kentucky-led brief urges the Supreme Court to review the case and to uphold the Florida law.
The brief argues that public university employees should be treated as other public employees, “who do not have a First Amendment right in their official, on-the-job speech on behalf of the government.”
“Citizens—speaking as citizens—have First Amendment rights, and they do not lose those rights by setting foot on campus,” the brief’s argument reads. “But university professors are also public employees, paid by a State to teach specific classes in specific ways.”
In a Monday written statement, Marshall argued that the Florida law and related acts ensure that university professors can’t “indoctrinate” students into holding certain beliefs.
“Academic freedom is a vital principle, but not a trump card. No public employee, whether a professor, teacher, or a clerk, get a bigger share of the First Amendment than anyone else,” Marshall said in a Tuesday written statement. “In Alabama, we protect students from DEI indoctrination, and we will defend that principle all the way to the Supreme Court.”
“Our coalition is fiercely committed to free speech and free inquiry, and that means students at public universities must have the ability to learn without their professors forcing them to believe racist concepts that are antithetical to our Nation’s founding ideals,” the attorney general added.
The ACLU, which represents the educators challenging the act, has argued that the Stop WOKE Act runs afoul of the First Amendment by limiting professors’ freedom to teach race- and gender-related topics to state-sponsored viewpoints.
“The Stop W.O.K.E. Act imposed restrictions based on specific viewpoints—precisely the kind of law that the First Amendment was designed to prevent,” the ACLU wrote following the Eleventh Circuit ruling. “Under the Act, a professor could teach the viewpoints on race and gender that the Florida legislature approved of, but could not express the disfavored viewpoint, even when it was foundational to their academic discipline.”
In the Eleventh Circuit Court’s ruling, the court condemned Florida’s argument that public university professors' speech may be limited as state employees as “a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular 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, ideally getting ever closer to the truth.”
“When several groups of professors challenged Florida’s new restrictions, the State cast about for an existing case or doctrine that could support its speech ban in the university setting,” the ruling reads. “Finding none, it tried to marry public-employee speech cases with government speech doctrine, resulting in a new rule: if the government pays a professor’s salary, it has total control over her classroom speech.”
“That is not a blessed union,” the court continued. “This new rule also runs headlong into the Supreme Court’s repeated, if imprecise, endorsements of academic freedom. If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it.”
However, the Alabama and Kentucky-led attorneys general argue in their brief that the court “enshrined for professors” expansive rights that no other citizens hold, and no other public employee holds “over his employer.”
The brief calls on the Supreme Court to clarify its ruling in Garcetti v. Ceballos, which held that the First Amendment does not protect public employees from retaliation or discipline when their speech is “pursuant to [their] official duties,” and to rule that public university professors are subject to the same restrictions.
“It is time for this Court to answer the question it left unanswered in Garcetti, and it should answer it by holding that public university professors do not have special First Amendment rights that no other American has,” the attorneys general wrote. “This Court’s ‘customary employee-speech jurisprudence,’ [the same] applies to professors just as it applies to every other public employee.”
A separate group of public educators has challenged Alabama’s law targeting DEI and “divisive concepts” in a case currently under appeal with the Eleventh Circuit.
The law, which passed in 2024, two years after the Stop WOKE Act, restricts public university professors from espousing a list of concepts which mirror those of the challenged Florida law. The act also barred public institutions of higher education from maintaining DEI offices and required the institutions to designate public restrooms “on the basis of biological sex; and to authorize certain penalties for violations.”
The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama denied plaintiff's request for a preliminary injunction that would have blocked the law in December 2025.
Monday’s brief was also signed by the Republican attorneys general of Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina and Texas.
A message was left requesting comments from the ACLU’s attorney in the suit challenging the Stop WOKE Act.
