Sending a White Supremacist back to class is a strange way to start the month but hey, it is Florida. Back in August the University of Florida expelled Preston Damsky over an antisemitic tweet. Damsky had earned notoriety earlier as the guy who got an A for writing a paper laying out the constitutionally backed case for a White ethnostate. Good on them for the effort. Law school is difficult enough without going to class with hate speech gunners. But Damsky took them to court, arguing that kicking him out for his tweet was a freedom of speech violation. Even if you don’t like the argument, it was good enough to get a judge to rule in his favor. Reuters has coverage:
A federal judge has ordered the University of Florida to reinstate a law student it expelled for making controversial statements about race and religion, including a post on X that said “Jews must be abolished by any means necessary.”
Chief U.S. District Judge Allen Winsor in Tallahassee granted a preliminary injunction on Monday requiring plaintiff Preston Damsky be readmitted to the Gainesville law school for now, finding that the school had not shown his statements online and in academic papers were true threats of violence and that the expulsion likely violated his free speech rights under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.
I think this outcome makes sense. Shitty thing to say, but without some aspect of immediacy, his “abolish” advocacy reads more like impotent wishful thinking than it does a legitimate threat. And while it might have sparked enough environmental hostility at a private college to justify giving a student the boot, the First Amendment thumbs the scale in Damsky’s favor at a public university. At least for now.
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There’s another case worth keeping on your radar. A professor at the University of Oklahoma was put on administrative leave after giving a student a failing grade for a poorly written paper. This time, we have a rubric that we can compare the assignment with:
Here’s the paper:
The Trump Gold Card: A New $1 Million Pathway To A U.S. Green Card
A new proposal would let wealthy foreign nationals secure an opportunity for a U.S. green card with a $1 million 'gift' to the government, sparking legal and ethical debate.
As you should be able to see, the paper is not good. The paper doesn’t even meet the “It was revealed to me in a dream” standard of citation, advances arguments a step from being circular, and, above all else, makes no clear connections to the assigned reading. For example, the student claims — and I’m paraphrasing here — that God had deliberate, teleological ends in mind when he made man and woman. Cool beans, but what does that have to do with the assigned article?
However, none of that matters because the content is religious in nature. The student cried censorship and here we are. The whole scenario screams Turning Point USA test case for Jesus being the answer or else. It’s a shame that Turning Point is spinning this as an attack on Christianity when all it evidences, if anything, is an attack on education. Does this honestly read like a college-level essay?
Since when does the First Amendment provide constitutional protection for sloppy scholarship? I don’t think I forgot any of the First Amendment’s freedoms… it’s not like I’m Amy Coney Barrett. Samantha’s essay reads like a Youth Pastor’s sermon on sex and gender for middle schoolers and Damsky’s White Supremacist essay is just plagerized KKK constitutionalism with a modernized flair. I’m a strong advocate for free speech; I just wish the speech wasn’t as shoddy.
Judge Orders Readmission Of Law Student Who Posted ‘Jews Must Be Abolished’ [Reuters]
Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s . He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who is learning to swim, is interested in critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at [email protected] and by tweet at @WritesForRent.