Parody land acknowledgement wins in court! FIRE files suit on behalf of Larry Bushart! 2025 was a record-setting year for student speech suppression! & more!
Bringing you the latest free speech news (12/21/25)
Stories of the week
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit today delivered a decisive victory for the First Amendment rights of public university faculty in Reges v. Cauce. Reversing a federal district court’s opinion, the Ninth Circuit held University of Washington officials violated the First Amendment when they punished Professor Stuart Reges for substituting his satirical take on the university’s preferred “land acknowledgment” statement on his syllabus.
“This lawsuit goes beyond Larry,” said FIRE attorney David Rubin. “It’s about making sure police everywhere understand that they cannot punish or intimidate people for sharing controversial opinions online. Law enforcement across the country should be on notice: Respect the First Amendment, or prepare to face the consequences.”
Cato is eloquent. Cato is memorable. Cato is quotable. But Cato is not inventing the underlying logic out of whole cloth. It is repackaging, popularizing, and sharpening an argument that the Levellers—among others—had already articulated in the heat of revolutionary struggle.
This week in Expression
‘Let them sue’: Iowa lawmakers scoffed at First Amendment in wake of Charlie Kirk shooting, records show by Graham Piro
Public records obtained by FIRE through a Freedom of Information Act request show state lawmakers exchanging messages inviting the possibility of First Amendment lawsuits for the sake of punishing speech they found offensive. “It’s worth the risk of lawsuits,” one lawmaker texted.
In other words, censorship is worth lawsuits. Iowa taxpayers: that’s your free speech rights — and your money — they’re putting at risk.
Moulthrop told me the City Club’s mission “necessarily means making the platform available to diverse points of view and people with political influence — people who, if they’re not shaping policy, they have the ear of people who are.” So it made sense to book [Center for Christian Virtue President Aaron] Baer for the Friday Forum, a “luncheon program devoted to significant national and regional concerns.”
Repression deepens in Hong Kong with Jimmy Lai’s guilty verdict and censorship over deadly Wang Fuk Court fire by Sarah McLaughlin
How schools still abuse ‘institutional neutrality’ to silence speech by Ross Marchand
The week on So to Speak
For well over 60 years, Nat Hentoff was a one of America’s foremost public intellectuals and a familiar byline to free speech advocates and jazz aficionados.
The First Amendment was a way of life for Hentoff. He would have been 100 years old this year. To reflect on his life and legacy, we are joined by his son Nick Hentoff and filmmaker David Lewis, whose 2013 documentary, “The Pleasures of Being Out of Step,” explored Nat Hentoff’s embodiment of free expression as the defining characteristic of the individual.
This week in FIRE’s blog
Can the government ban controversial public holiday displays? by Jacob N. Gaba
DOJ plan to target ‘domestic terrorists’ risks chilling speech by Adam Goldstein
People who conspire to engage in actual criminal behavior should be investigated, arrested, and prosecuted. But these memos aren’t narrowly focused on groups that exist for the purpose of ideologically motivated violence, which act to bring about violence; they broadly condemn particular viewpoints and lay a foundation for a government watchlist of American groups which share those viewpoints. And where does that get us? You can’t vindicate American values against anti-American ideologies with un-American practices like warmed-over McCarthyism.
FIRE in the press!
First Amendment protections embrace moments precisely like this. As the Supreme Court made clear in Rankin v. McPherson, public employees do not “relinquish the First Amendment rights they would otherwise enjoy” as private citizens to comment on public discourse, simply because they work for the government. The government may punish such speech only if it demonstrably disrupts workplace operations—not simply because officials dislike an employee’s viewpoint.
London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup
Ninth Circuit reverses dismissal of prof’s challenge to punishment for parodying U. Wash’s preferred land acknowledgment on his syllabus, holding academic freedom protects it as comment on a matter of public concern
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has revived the First Amendment claims of a University of Washington professor whom it investigated, reprimanded, and threatened to discipline for having his syllabus parodize UW’s preferred “land acknowledgment,” i.e., its formal statement acknowledging parts of the campus were originally home to Indigenous people. Although a Washington federal district court found the parody to be speech on a matter of public concern, it dismissed the case by holding under Pickering v. Board of Education that UW’s interest in avoiding disruption to staff functions, teaching assistants, and the learning environment outweighed the professor’s First Amendment interest in speaking. The district court also dismissed his challenge to UW’s policy under which it acted, treating the restriction against “unacceptable or inappropriate” conduct to reach speech that “resembles” discrimination, harassment, or retaliation so as avoid unconstitutional overbreadth or vagueness. The Ninth Circuit reversed, holding the balancing of interests below was erroneous. It first held the syllabus’ parodic land acknowledgment was protected speech, not government speech, as the prof spoke in his own capacity not on behalf of his university employer. It then held “student discomfort with a professor’s views can prompt discussion and disapproval” but any such “discomfort is not grounds for the university retaliating.” “Student unrest is an inevitable byproduct of our core First Amendment safeguards in the higher education context,” the court held, and that type of unrest “cannot be the type of disruption that permits restricting or punishing a professor’s academic speech.” Put differently: “avoiding the disruption on college campuses that necessarily accompanies controversial speech, … cannot justify the suppression of the very diversity of views that is central to the mission of higher education.” The court therefore sent the case back for a determination of what relief Reges should get on his retaliation and viewpoint discrimination claims. It also reversed dismissal of his challenge to the policy, holding the way the district court construed it in order to salvage it from invalidation as unconstitutional “conflicts with the policy’s plain text” and was thus erroneous, with that claim also remanded for the district court to try again, “taking into account how the policy has been enforced and applied in practice.” FIRE litigated the case.
BONUS CASE: In NetChoice v. Murrill, another state social media age-verification/parental-consent regime is held unconstitutional under the First Amendment as the court “treads a well-worn path” following “at least nine other district courts [that] have considered similar challenges to similar state laws” over the last two years.
International free speech stories of the week
Former Hong Kong pro-democracy media mogul Jimmy Lai convicted in landmark national security trial (AP) by Kanis Leung
UK police arrest pro-Palestinian protesters as authorities toughen hate speech law enforcement (WaPo) by Danica Kirka
What changes are planned to Australia’s hate speech laws and how will they work? (The Guardian)
The Albanese Labor government is seeking to toughen hate speech laws, crack down on Islamic preachers spouting hatred, and make it easier to cancel or reject visas, as part of a broad response to antisemitism after the Bondi terror shooting.
But exact details of the crackdowns – including how they will work and what the new thresholds will be – are still to be finalised.
Video of the week
FIRE covered the case of Gordon Klein back in 2020, one of the many professors targeted for locally unpopular but undoubtedly constitutionally protected speech during the madness of the post-George Floyd “racial reckoning.” Just this past summer, Klein went to trial to try to receive justice. Check out this video update on the case by the great Rob Montz.
The Reges land acknowledgement case is huge for academic speech protections. The Ninth Circuit making it clear that student discomfort can't be grounds for retaliation basicaly dismantles the heckler's veto that's been operating on campuses for years. What caught my eye was the pattern across jurisdictions with the age verification laws getting struck down. Nine district courts in two years following the same reasoning shows how obviously unconstitutional these are, but legislatures keep passing them anyway. Makes you wonder if they're performative from the start.