University of Florida Told Five More Professors Not to Testify Against State

The University of Florida forbade five faculty members from testifying as expert witnesses in cases against the state in addition to the three reported last week, according to the Miami Herald. The college ordered law professors Kenneth Nunn, Sarah K. Wolking, Teresa Jean Reid, and Mark Fenster not to sign an amicus curiae brief identifying themselves as University of Florida professors in a 2020 case challenging the state’s statutes on felons’ voting rights. Nunn told the Herald, “I thought that it was strange and frightening that there would be that kind of Big Brother management to these types of things that we were doing.” The school also prohibited pediatric medicine professor Jeffrey Goldhagen from testifying in two cases challenging the state’s mask mandates. He defied the denial and filed to testify as an expert anyway. “I don’t think it is hyperbole when I say this is how totalitarian regimes unfold,” he said. The college decreed last year that three political science professors should steer clear of testifying in a legal challenge to the state’s new restrictive voting law. The school announced Monday that it would allow the three professors to provide expert witness testimony only if they do so unpaid. A UF provost wrote, “If the professors wish to testify pro bono on their own time without using university resources, they are free to do so.”