Judge orders readmission of law student who posted 'Jews must be abolished'

[Behind the Aegis]

Nov 25 (Reuters) - 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, opens new tab 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.

“The University, of course, has an interest in maintaining order, but it has no interest in violating the First Amendment to achieve that goal,” Winsor said.

Damsky’s attorney, Anthony Sabatini, on Tuesday called the ruling “a big win for the First Amendment.” He said his client had missed an entire semester of law school due to the dispute.

A university spokesperson declined to comment on Tuesday.

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[stopdiggin]

1. there are lots of places where hate speech is not tolerated

If this was a private place of work - this ass-hat would not be getting his job back. The government however (with a public institution standing in its stead ... ) It's been long established that ugly speech does not contravene ...
And still - I think this ruling is probably erroneous. We'll see I guess,

[exboyfil]

2. Any means necessary is a threat

Whether he is talking about Jews or any other group.

[AZJonnie]

3. The ambiguity stems from the word "abolished" which is not clearly calling for violence

Abolishing typically means "casting aside", "kicking out", etc, and is not typically applied to "people", but rather to "practices". Distasteful and hateful as the sentence is, I think the court's decision is at least defensible insofar as it seems like protected speech. MHO, fwiw.

[RandySF]

4. Oh it's very clear to me.

[AZJonnie]

5. I'm not saying what he actually meant is unclear, only that it's *just* ambiguous enough that it allows

for constitutional wiggle-room in a situation where the 1A might logically apply, such as this one.

It's almost like the dude specifically chose this word to have exactly this courtroom fight, if I'm in CT mode.

[EdmondDantes_]

6. There's a couple of things that give him some legal leeway

As noted in the article there was a Harvard professor who said the same thing but about white people. It was a nuanced position about how groups like unions have acted along racial lines by excluding black people to advance their interests. The underlying point was about how race underlies so much in our society and white people need to stop acting like that.

For reference here's a bit on what the professor meant even though it's not the original direct source, just the professor writing about it.

https://www.harvardmagazine.com/sites/default/files/pdf/2002/09-pdfs/0902-30.pdf

In theory the post could have been a satire of that or just standard run of the mill legal anti-Semitic tropes about how Jewish people are loyal to their religion or Israel above being American. Gross either way since Jewish people aren't equivalent to the social position of non-Jewish white people in terms of historical discrimination.

I don't give the guy credit for it being clever satire, and think it's just anti-Semitism.

The other legal area is the lack of specifics. A threat legally speaking has to be direct, immediate, and actionable. Given he has no realistic ability to carry out his threat, legally it might not meet the threshold.

https://uwm.edu/freespeech/faqs/what-constitutes-a-true-threat/

But one could argue that the specific history of Jewish people would make it a threat in the same way it's illegal to use a cross burning to intimidate black people but I could burn one to protest something else.

That said, my opinion is the guy is at best a racist troll who isn't a serious human much less lawyer in training. At worst he's a potentially violent racist who thankfully doesn't seem to have much charisma to get like-minded idiots to follow him.

Personally I feel skeevy "defending" the guy on these grounds, but the 1st amendment defends a lot of abhorrent words to ensure that it protects a lot of speech that is good but might be unpopular. Any non-state college could absolutely toss the guy out of school and I'd cheer them for it. But the government is held to a different standard.