A group of 13 Republican state attorneys general highlighted a case of a University of Kentucky professor accused of antisemitism in a brief filed with the Supreme Court on Monday in a case examining the limits of free-speech protections for professors at public universities.

The attorneys general, led by Kentucky AG Russell Coleman and Alabama AG Steve Marshall, filed the brief in support of the state of Florida’s petition for the high court to hear the case of Pernell v. Florida Board of Governors, which challenges Florida’s “Stop W.O.K.E. Act,” placing limitations on how educators in public institutions of higher education can discuss certain sensitive topics in the classroom. 

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in July affirmed a lower court’s injunction against the legislation. The AGs — from Alabama, Kentucky, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina and Texas — wrote in support of Florida’s efforts to uphold the law.

The new brief highlights the case of University of Kentucky law professor Ramsi Woodcock, who was placed under suspension amid an investigation into whether he used his official capacity to encourage violence and genocide against the Israeli people, including military action against Israel. A district court in the Western District of Kentucky has upheld the suspension.

The brief argues that professors at universities should only be entitled to First Amendment protections in their private capacities, not in their official capacities as taxpayer-funded employees. The Republican AGs argued that the courts’ ruling would effectively provide professors with a greater level of speech protection not enjoyed by any other public employee in their official capacity.

The brief argues that only universities, rather than individual professors, are entitled to academic freedom.

“Ten states, 10 attorneys general, are rowing together with the assertion that professors don’t get some sort of inviolate free speech rights that transcend that of normal public employees,” Coleman told JI in an interview on Monday. “Now, certainly, they can assert their sacrosanct First Amendment rights as individuals, but as employees, as representatives of academic institutions, they do not have that right under the Constitution.”

He described the brief as part of his fight to ensure that antisemitism cannot flourish in Kentucky or grow into violence against the Jewish people, noting that last year he had visited sites of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacres in Israel.

He said that the brief aims to protect the state’s investigation into Woodcock and the state’s ability to “say that this is not acceptable here.”

“These professors don’t have, by virtue of being in academia, some sort of extra-constitutional sacrosanct ability to articulate their views, particularly when they cross lines as to antisemitism or foul conduct of that nature,” he continued.

He said that the issue is “personal to me” because he witnessed the impact of antisemitic violence in Israel as well as because of conversations he has had with friends in the state whose families had to consider whether the university campuses they were choosing would be safe or friendly to them as Jewish people — something that he said the Jewish community didn’t have to do a generation ago.

“They have chosen certain campuses because those campuses they viewed as more friendly to their Jewish identity,” Coleman recounted. “They didn’t attend their mother and father’s law school because it has become an environment that they view as hostile to their Jewish identity.”

He urged the Supreme Court to take up the case, arguing that the support of the coalition of attorneys general should send a powerful message.