\n<\/p>\n
SB 2972 was passed after students at several public Texas universities protested the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.<\/p>\n
Jon Shapley\/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images<\/span><\/p>\n A Texas district court judge on Tuesday ordered the University of Texas system to hold off on enforcing new, sweeping limits on student expression that would prohibit any \u201cexpressive activity\u201d protected by the First Amendment between 10\u00a0p.m. and 8\u00a0a.m.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe First Amendment does not have a bedtime of 10\u00a0p.m.,\u201d wrote U.S. district court judge David Alan Ezra in his order granting the plaintiff\u2019s request for a preliminary injunction. \u201cGiving administrators discretion to decide what is prohibited \u2018disruptive\u2019 speech gives the school the ability to weaponize the policy against speech it disagrees with. As an example, the Overnight Expression Ban would, by its terms, prohibit a sunrise Easter service. While the university may not find this disruptive, the story may change if it\u2019s a Muslim or Jewish sunrise ceremony. The songs and prayer of the Muslim and Jewish ceremonies, while entirely harmless, may be considered \u2018disruptive\u2019 by some.\u201d<\/p>\n A coalition of student groups\u2014including the student-run Retrograde Newspaper, the Fellowship of Christian University Students at the University of Texas at Dallas and the student music group Strings Attached\u2014sued to challenge the restrictions, which, in addition to prohibiting expression overnight, also sought to ban campus public speakers, the use of drums and amplified noise during the last two weeks of the semester. The restrictive policies align with Texas Senate Bill 2972, called the Campus Protection Act, which requires public universities to adopt restrictions on student speech and expression. The bill took effect on Sept.\u00a01.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cTexas\u2019 law is so overbroad that any public university student chatting in the dorms past 10\u00a0p.m. would have been in violation,\u201d said Adam Steinbaugh, a senior attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, in a press release. \u201cWe\u2019re thankful that the court stepped in and halted a speech ban that inevitably would\u2019ve been weaponized to censor speech that administrators disagreed with.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" SB 2972 was passed after students at several public Texas universities protested the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Jon Shapley\/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images A Texas district court judge on Tuesday ordered the University of Texas system to hold off on enforcing new, sweeping limits on student expression that would prohibit any \u201cexpressive activity\u201d protected by the First<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28500,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[163,4096,10867,675,1053,393,16938],"class_list":{"0":"post-28499","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-ban","9":"tag-comprehensive","10":"tag-halts","11":"tag-judge","12":"tag-speech","13":"tag-student","14":"tag-uts"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28499\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/28500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}