As an example, the law labels instruction discriminatory if students are led to believe that they bear "responsibility for, or should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment because of, actions committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin or sex."

As another example, the law seeks to prohibit instruction that would cause students to "feel guilt, anguish or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the person played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin or sex."

In a motion for a stay of the preliminary injunction, the state's attorneys disputed that the law violates speech rights, saying that all "the act does is prohibit the state's educators from endorsing the enumerated concepts while teaching the state's curriculum, in the state's classrooms, on the state's time, in return for a state paycheck."

"(The) implications of the district court's decision are startling, for it anoints individual professors as universities unto themselves, at liberty under the First Amendment to indoctrinate college students in whatever views they please, no matter how contrary to the university's curriculum or how noxious to the people of Florida," the motion said. "In short, the district court's First Amendment ruling was wrong, and this (11th Circuit) Court is likely to reverse it."

But in the responses filed Thursday, the plaintiffs' attorneys criticized that argument.

"To defend the act, the state makes the remarkable assertion that college and university instructors have no First Amendment interests whatsoever in their classroom teaching and that the state — here, the Legislature, not the university — may control this speech entirely," the response filed on behalf of the group of instructors said. "But First Amendment freedoms do not exist at the whim of the Legislature. The pursuit of knowledge through free exchange of ideas in college and university classrooms has long been protected by the First Amendment and guided by the sound pedagogical decisions of the academy itself."

Walker, who was appointed to the federal bench by former President Barack Obama, issued the preliminary injunction in both cases after hearing oral arguments. In addition to calling the law "positively dystopian," Walker said it is "antithetical to academic freedom and has cast a leaden pall of orthodoxy over Florida's state universities."