Amicus brief for University of Mississippi faculty in a First Amendment appeal

Lauren Stokes was fired by the University of Mississippi after sharing a social media post. She sued under the First Amendment, the district court dismissed her claims, and she appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

The firm filed a brief in support of reversal on behalf of three members of the university’s faculty: James M. Thomas, Professor of Sociology; Wendy Goldberg, Senior Lecturer in Composition and Rhetoric; and Graham Pitts, Assistant Professor of History and International Studies. Each joined in an individual capacity. Their shared interest, as the brief puts it, is in the university’s consistent adherence to the First Amendment when it regulates faculty and staff speech.

The brief is a history. It traces the university’s record from the 1950s and 1960s, when the state’s Sovereignty Commission and the Board of Trustees of State Institutions of Higher Learning worked together to surveil, list and punish faculty and students who spoke against segregation, through the uneven progress that followed, to the modern university’s considerable First Amendment muscle. It argues that, in light of that history, the university’s stated reason for Ms. Stokes’ termination deserves close scrutiny rather than deference, and that the federal courts have a distinguished record of enforcing the First Amendment at the university when the university would not.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a separate amicus brief in the same appeal. The case is pending.