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The First Amendment protects speech 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. That includes at public universities, which are supposed to be beacons of free expression. But in Texas, campus speech faces a new law that threatens a staggering amount of protected expression at the state’s public universities and colleges. 

In the spring of 2025, the Texas Legislature passed Senate Bill 2972. The law amends a 2019 law which aimed to protect free speech at Texas’s institutions of higher learning, adding several blanket bans on protected expression on campus. Among its many speech-restrictive provisions, the new law requires public universities and colleges to prohibit nearly all protected expression between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. And it also requires those institutions to ban expressive activities involving invited speakers, amplified speakers, and percussive instruments during the last two weeks of any academic term. 

The First Amendment doesn’t stand for such a sweeping chill on protected speech at public universities and colleges — especially one that provides campus administrators a tool to target speech and speakers they don’t like. 

That’s why on September 3, 2025, FIREsued to stop officials at The University of Texas System, The University of Texas at Austin, and The University of Texas at Dallas from enforcing those bans on protected expression. FIRErepresents a diverse group of plaintiffs, including a student newspaper, a Christian ministry group, political advocates, and student musician groups.