TALLAHASSEE — A federal judge on Tuesday blocked Florida education officials from enforcing a law requiring a transgender teacher to use pronouns that align with her sex assigned at birth, saying the law violated her First Amendment rights.

The 2023 law restricts educators’ use of personal pronouns and titles in schools.

Violations of the law — one of a number of measures backed by the Republican-controlled Legislature and Gov. Ron DeSantis targeting the LGBTQ community over the past few years — can result in teachers being stripped of certifications and hefty financial penalties for school districts.

Plaintiffs Katie Wood, a transgender Hillsborough County teacher, and AV Schwandes, a nonbinary teacher fired last year by Florida Virtual School, sought preliminary injunctions as part of a lawsuit challenging the restrictions.

The challenge alleged the law violates the teachers’ First Amendment rights and runs afoul of a federal civil-rights law.

Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker issued a preliminary injunction Tuesday that blocked enforcement of the law against Wood, but the injunction does not apply statewide. Walker’s decision also denied a preliminary injunction sought by Schwandes.

“Once again, the state of Florida has a First Amendment problem. Of late, it has happened so frequently, some might say you can set your clock by it,” Walker’s 60-page ruling began.

TALLAHASSEE — A federal judge on Tuesday blocked Florida education officials from enforcing a law requiring a transgender teacher to use pronouns that align with her sex assigned at birth, saying the law violated her First Amendment rights.

The 2023 law restricts educators’ use of personal pronouns and titles in schools.

Violations of the law — one of a number of measures backed by the Republican-controlled Legislature and Gov. Ron DeSantis targeting the LGBTQ community over the past few years — can result in teachers being stripped of certifications and hefty financial penalties for school districts.

Plaintiffs Katie Wood, a transgender Hillsborough County teacher, and AV Schwandes, a nonbinary teacher fired last year by Florida Virtual School, sought preliminary injunctions as part of a lawsuit challenging the restrictions.

The challenge alleged the law violates the teachers’ First Amendment rights and runs afoul of a federal civil-rights law.

Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker issued a preliminary injunction Tuesday that blocked enforcement of the law against Wood, but the injunction does not apply statewide. Walker’s decision also denied a preliminary injunction sought by Schwandes.

“Once again, the state of Florida has a First Amendment problem. Of late, it has happened so frequently, some might say you can set your clock by it,” Walker’s 60-page ruling began.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Another group of Republican-led states is suing to block the Biden administration’s new student loan repayment plan, which offers a faster path to cancellation and has already been used to forgive loans for more than 150,000 borrowers.

Seven states led by Missouri filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday challenging Biden’s SAVE Plan, which has become a new legal target for conservative opponents after the Supreme Court toppled the Democratic president’s first attempt at student loan cancellation. It largely mirrors another suit filed last month by Republican attorneys general in 11 states, led by Kansas.

“Yet again, the President is unilaterally trying to impose an extraordinarily expensive and controversial policy that he could not get through Congress,” according to the new suit.

Filed just a day after Biden trumpeted a new proposal to cancel student loans for millions of borrowers, the lawsuit sets the stage for one legal battle and foreshadows another. The suit doesn’t directly challenge Biden’s newest plan for cancellation, but its architect, Missouri’s attorney general, separately threatened to bring action against that plan, too.

A statement from the Education Department says Congress gave the agency power to define terms of certain repayment plans in 1993, and that authority has been used before.

The Texas supreme court closed out 2023 by blocking an abortion during a medical emergency, forcing a woman to flee the state. Just days before Christmas, Wisconsin justices struck down the state’s GOP-drawn gerrymanders. So far this year, Montana’s supreme court has stepped in to protect voting rights, while a decision in Alabama threatened in vitro fertilization treatments.

In each of these states, unlike at the federal level, voters chose who sits on the bench and which judges get to dictate such profound consequences. And the 2024 elections may now reshape who holds power on supreme courts across the country.

Thirty-three states have elections for their high courts this year; some have as many as five or six seats on the ballot. In total, 82 seats are up for voters to decide.

These races to decide the composition of state courts could potentially shift the outcome in high-stakes cases that are already in the legal pipeline on everything from the rules of direct democracy to the fate of reproductive rights.

Michigan and Ohio are the two states where a supreme court’s partisan majority could flip outright. Democrats are defending a narrow edge in Michigan; the GOP is doing the same in Ohio.

But the 2024 elections may also affect the ideological balance of other supreme courts, starting with Kentucky, Montana, North Carolina, and Texas. Some of these states hold nonpartisan races where judicial candidates are not affiliated to political parties; but those courts still tend to have liberal, moderate, and conservative wings, and parties and other groups often get involved in their elections, sometimes pouring in huge amounts of money.

Mark Joseph Stern
@mjs_DC

Here is the Arizona Supreme Court's decision reviving a 160-year-old total abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest.

Remember that Arizona Republicans expanded their state Supreme Court to entrench today's hard-right conservative majority. https://azcourts.gov/Portals/0/OpinionFiles/Supreme/2024/CV230005PR.pdf

The Arizona Supreme Court makes it clear that rape victims may no longer terminate their pregnancies within the state at any point, even at the very outset of pregnancy. Any Arizona doctor who helps a rape victim obtain an abortion may now be imprisoned. https://azcourts.gov/Portals/0/OpinionFiles/Supreme/2024/CV230005PR.pdf

RALEIGH, N.C. (WNCN) – The Biden campaign will launch a multi-state tour this week beginning in North Carolina, featuring two women impacted by restrictions on abortion in southern states, CBS 17 has learned.

Amanda Zurawski and Kaitlyn Joshua will travel to Durham, Charlotte and Winston-Salem sharing their personal experiences about medical complications they faced in their home states when they say they were denied care while pregnant.

The tour comes as former President Donald Trump faces questions about what restrictions he would pursue if elected and said he would be making an announcement this week on abortion policy following a court decision in Florida that will allow a six-week ban on abortion to take effect next month.

Trump called the overturning of Roe v. Wade “a miracle” while campaigning in Iowa in January as he talked about how his three U.S. Supreme Court picks helped make that happen.

“Abortion is on the ballot in November and we’re making it clear to voters the threat Donald Trump poses if re-elected,” said Dory MacMillan, North Carolina communications director for the Biden campaign, in a statement. “Women across the South, including here in North Carolina, have made it clear we want our rights protected, and we’re grateful to Amanda and Kaitlyn for sharing their stories and reminding us what’s at stake in this election.”

Mathew D. Staver, a lawyer for two anti-abortion groups, said he was considering options for challenging the proposed abortion rights amendment.Credit...Brendan Farrington/Associated Press


Abortion-rights supporters celebrated last week when the Florida Supreme Court said voters could decide this fall whether to approve a state constitutional amendment protecting and expanding abortion rights in Florida. But the court also laid out a road map for anti-abortion groups to challenge any expansion, by raising the prospect of “fetal personhood.”

In concurring and dissenting opinions that accompanied the ruling, four of the seven justices on the conservative court indicated that they may interpret the State Constitution to grant fetuses the same legal rights as people, foretelling the next likely court fight over abortion. The proposed state constitutional amendment would guarantee access to abortion “before viability,” or before about 24 weeks of pregnancy.

“If this does pass — but even if it doesn’t pass — I think that there is an open door to go to the Florida Supreme Court,” said Mathew D. Staver, a lawyer for two anti-abortion groups that oppose the ballot measure, the Liberty Counsel and Florida Voters Against Extremism.

Anti-abortion activists have promoted the fetal personhood legal strategy since the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated the federal right to abortion in 2022. What has been perhaps their biggest success came in February, when the Alabama Supreme Court held that a frozen embryo should be considered a person, opening a new front in the legal debate over abortion.

What was striking in Florida was that the argument was not raised by one of the lawyers opposing the abortion ballot measure, but rather by the court.

On April 1, the Florida Supreme Court, in a 6–1 ruling, overturned decades of decisions beginning in 1989 that recognized a woman’s right to choose—that is, whether to have an abortion—up to the time of viability.

Anchored in Florida’s own constitutional right to privacy, this critical individual right to abortion had been repeatedly affirmed by the state Supreme Court, which consistently struck down conflicting laws passed by the Legislature.

As explained first in 1989:

Florida’s privacy provision is clearly implicated in a woman’s decision of whether or not to continue her pregnancy. We can conceive of few more personal or private decisions concerning one’s body in the course of a lifetime.

Tellingly, the justices at the time acknowledged that their decision was based not only on U.S. Supreme Court precedent but also on Florida’s own privacy amendment.

I served on the Supreme Court of Florida beginning in 1998 and retired, based on our mandatory retirement requirement, a little more than two decades later. Whether Florida’s Constitution provided a right to privacy that encompassed abortion was never questioned, even by those who would have been deemed the most conservative justices—almost all white men back in 1989!

And strikingly, one of the conservative justices at that time stated: “If the United States Supreme Court were to subsequently recede from Roe v. Wade, this would not diminish the abortion rights now provided by the privacy amendment of the Florida Constitution.” Wow!

On April 1, the Florida Supreme Court, in a 6–1 ruling, overturned decades of decisions beginning in 1989 that recognized a woman’s right to choose—that is, whether to have an abortion—up to the time of viability.

Anchored in Florida’s own constitutional right to privacy, this critical individual right to abortion had been repeatedly affirmed by the state Supreme Court, which consistently struck down conflicting laws passed by the Legislature.

As explained first in 1989:

Florida’s privacy provision is clearly implicated in a woman’s decision of whether or not to continue her pregnancy. We can conceive of few more personal or private decisions concerning one’s body in the course of a lifetime.

Tellingly, the justices at the time acknowledged that their decision was based not only on U.S. Supreme Court precedent but also on Florida’s own privacy amendment.

I served on the Supreme Court of Florida beginning in 1998 and retired, based on our mandatory retirement requirement, a little more than two decades later. Whether Florida’s Constitution provided a right to privacy that encompassed abortion was never questioned, even by those who would have been deemed the most conservative justices—almost all white men back in 1989!

And strikingly, one of the conservative justices at that time stated: “If the United States Supreme Court were to subsequently recede from Roe v. Wade, this would not diminish the abortion rights now provided by the privacy amendment of the Florida Constitution.” Wow!