Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression Cases (2025-26) and Their Ideological Valence
FIRE has billed itself as a nonpartisan organization that fights speech restrictions that are seen as left-wing, right-wing, and no-wing. Some have, however, argued that FIRE mostly fights left-wing restrictions (and thus mostly protects right-wing speakers), and goes after only a few right-wing restrictions as supposed "tokens" to hide its true nature.
To test that, I used Westlaw to find all 2025 and 2026 court opinions that mention FIRE as a lawyer for a party, and tried to classify them. Note that I'm not including cases where there has been no court decision yet or cases where the last court decision was before 2025. I'm also not including the many cases where FIRE has filed amicus (friend-of-the-court) briefs: This is partly to keep the list manageable, but chiefly because amicus briefs, while potentially valuable (I file plenty myself), don't represent the same level of commitment of resources as representing a party would.
Here is the list of the 23 cases that I found that meet my criteria, listed in reverse chronological order by the date of the most recent decision in the case that I could find. For each restriction, I've tried to indicate whether it's a restriction that basically comes from the right, from the left, or from neither direction; sometimes, as you can see, it's difficult to figure that out. I may have missed some cases, but I think this should be a pretty complete and at least representative list:
| Case | Challenged restriction | Restriction coming from … |
| Meeks v. Lawrence (M.D. Tenn.) | Firing of government employee for post critical of Charlie Kirk after his assassination | Right |
| Streever v. Mullin (D.D.C.) | ICE warning and investigation for critical letter sent to ICE official | Right |
| Mastriano v. Gregory (W.D. Okla.) | Libel lawsuit over allegations of errors in Ph.D. thesis | Right (plaintiff is conservative legislator) |
| Stanford Daily Publishing Corporation v. Rubio (N.D. Cal.) | Deportation of noncitizens for anti-Israel views | Right |
| Pernell v. Florida Board of Governors of State University (11th Cir.) | Florida's Individual Freedom Act ("Stop WOKE Act"), which bars university instructors from promoting or endorsing eight listed concepts about race and sex (viewpoint-based restriction; vagueness). | Right |
| Spectrum WT v. Wendler (5th Cir.) | Ban on drag shows on campus | Right |
| Nazarene v. Dehmer (D.N.J.) | Ban on board members discussing board business in public | None; defending apparently conservative school board member |
| Reges v. Cauce (9th Cir.) | Retaliation against professor for criticism of land acknowledgments on class syllabus | Left |
| Robinson v. Damphousse (W.D. Tex.) | Professor's off-campus pro-Palestinian talk | Right |
| Rosado v. Bondi (N.D. Ill.) | Government's alleged jawboning of Facebook and Apple to remove ICE-monitoring content | Right |
| Coble v. Ballentine (N.C. Ct. App.) | Harassment restraining order barring critic from speaking about former mayoral candidate | Right? (speaker was apparently criticizing right-wing candidate from the left) |
| Kershnar v. Kolison (W.D.N.Y.) | University's firing of philosophy professor for podcast comments on adult-child sex | Neither |
| NetChoice, LLC v. Bonta (9th Cir.) | California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act aimed at social media speech to children | Neither |
| Hogarth v. Hayes (E.D.N.C.) | Bans on ballot selfies | Neither |
| B. A. v. Tri County Area Schools (6th Cir.) | School banning "Let's Go Brandon" slogan as vulgar | Left?; defending conservative speech |
| I.P. v. Tullahoma City Schools (E.D. Tenn.) | High school student posting memes with images of principal | Neither |
| Donnelly v. Des Moines Register (S.D. Iowa) | Trump supporters' consumer fraud lawsuit over election poll | Right |
| Fellowship of Christian University Students v. Eltife (W.D. Tex.) | Law requiring public universities to ban expressive activity at night and at the end of the semester | Right, though representing conservativish organization |
| Volokh v. James (2d Cir.) | Law requiring social media platforms to post "hateful conduct" policies | Left |
| Phillips v. Collin County Comm. College Dist. (E.D. Tex.) | Firing of college professor for public statements about COVID policies | Right |
| Jensen v. Brown (9th Cir.) | Discipline of professor for conceerns about change to math curriculum | Left? |
| Students Engaged in Advancing Texas v. Paxton (W.D. Tex.) | Texas SCOPE Act restricting minors' use of social media | Neither |
| Palsgaard v. Christian (E.D. Cal.) | College requiring pro-DEI teaching | Left |
One can't expect complete partisan balance, of course, since much depends on where most of the speech restrictions are coming from in 2025-26; which litigants already have lawyers of their own; which cases happened to be decided during the relevant time; and so on. But I think it's fair to say here that FIRE is challenging restrictions coming from all parts of the ideological spectrum.
To be sure, some people argue that the real reason FIRE is going after right-wing speech restrictions and thus protecting left-wing speakers is just to give it political credibility for its real mission, which is protecting right-wing speakers. Based on my knowledge of the people at FIRE, I doubt that this is so: I think they really do want to protect speakers with a wide range of ideological views.
But in any event, one reason people have long protected speakers they disagree with is precisely to build protection for the people they agree with. To quote the noted liberal Justice Hugo Black (in a statement also adopted by Justice Powell's majority opinion in Healy v. James (1972)),
I do not believe that it can be too often repeated that the freedoms of speech, press, petition and assembly guaranteed by the First Amendment must be accorded to the ideas we hate or sooner or later they will be denied to the ideas we cherish.
Even if an organization defends speakers it disagrees with simply because it wants that to lead to more protection for speakers they agree with—again, I don't think that's FIRE's motivation, but even say that it were—that strikes me as a perfectly worthy mission for a pro-free-speech organization.
Note that I was once engaged on a consulting project for FIRE (several years ago now); I have gotten honoraria from them for various talks, and will likely be getting more in the future; I am being represented by them in Volokh v. James; I have been represented by them in First Amendment Coalition v. Chiu; I have represented them in amicus briefs in various other cases; and I am friendly with various people there. If this leads you distrust my analysis, you can certainly go through the cases yourself and tally your own results. I was not asked by anyone to put up this post, and I didn't discuss this post with them before putting it up.