At DeSantis’s urging, the Florida legislature passed a law known as “Stop Woke.” The law restricts teaching about race and gender in the state’s classrooms and bans “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs in the workplace. Several employers sued to block the law, calling it a restriction on free speech. The employers won in the federal District Court, and the state appealed the decision. Today the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the Stop Woke Act as applied to employers. It remains in effect for schools.

The Orlando Sentinel reported:

TALLAHASSEE — A federal appeals court Monday rejected restrictions that Gov. Ron DeSantis and Republican lawmakers placed on race-related issues in workplace training, part of a 2022 law that DeSantis dubbed the “Stop WOKE Act.”


A three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the restrictions violated First Amendment rights.


“This is not the first era in which Americans have held widely divergent views on important areas of morality, ethics, law and public policy,” the 22-page opinion said. “And it is not the first time that these disagreements have seemed so important, and their airing so dangerous, that something had to be done. But now, as before, the First Amendment keeps the government from putting its thumb on the scale.”


The panel upheld a preliminary injunction issued in 2022 by Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker of Tallahassee against the restrictions. The law was challenged by Primo Tampa, LLC, a Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream franchisee; Honeyfund.com, Inc., a Clearwater-based technology company that provides wedding registries; and Chevara Orrin and her company, Collective Concepts, LLC.

Orrin and her company provide consulting and training to employers about issues such as diversity, equity and inclusion.


Walker also separately issued a preliminary injunction against part of the law that would restrict the teaching of race-related concepts in universities. The state has appealed that decision.


The workplace-training part of the law listed eight race-related concepts and said that a required training program or other activity that “espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels such individual (an employee) to believe any of the following concepts constitutes discrimination based on race, color, sex, or national origin.”


As an example, the law targeted compelling employees to believe that an “individual, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the individual played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, sex, or national origin.”

The state disputed that the law violated speech rights, saying that it regulated “conduct.” It said businesses could still address the targeted concepts in workplace training but couldn’t force employees to take part.


But the appeals court flatly rejected such arguments Monday. It described the law as the “latest attempt to control speech by recharacterizing it as conduct. Florida may be exactly right about the nature of the ideas it targets. Or it may not. Either way, the merits of these views will be decided in the clanging marketplace of ideas rather than a codebook or a courtroom.”