Today, LSU law professor Ken Levy is back in class, his suspension by the university lifted on the order of a friendly Baton Rouge judge.

District Judge Tarvald Smith granted Levy’s request for a temporary restraining order against LSU.

He was the second judge to issue that same order, with the First Circuit striking down the first restraining order until an evidentiary hearing could be held.

That hearing began Monday and included testimony from Levy, LSU President William Tate, LSU students, the dean of the LSU law school and others.

While giving the final ruling on Tuesday, Judge Smith read the First Amendment out loud in court, saying he did not see a problem with the language Levy used in class.

“The use of profanity in this court’s opinion is dismissive and that he does not agree with a political figure,” Smith said.

During closing arguments, Levy’s attorney Jill Craft said, “If we can’t be in a society where there’s unfettered dialogue…then what kind of lawyers are we creating because we no longer have a system of justice that is primarily on the notion of zealous advocacy.”

Jimmy Faircloth, the attorney representing LSU, blamed Levy’s team for creating fear in students who testified earlier in court today.

“They are whipping up the fear,” Faircloth said. “There’s not an ounce of evidence that President Tate’s decision was to punish someone’s political beliefs.”

Outside the courthouse, Levy reacted to the ruling, saying “everyone was vulnerable if I lost this.”

“Shame on LSU. Shame on the leadership for doing this to me and really doing it to everybody else through me,” Levy said. “They were incompetent, they were callous, they knowingly violated my rights.”

It’s important to remember that the First Circuit Court of Appeal has already rejected a ruling of Smith’s in this case, though it’s unknown whether they’ll do it this time.

The internal investigation of Levy’s classroom conduct continues. All Smith did was insure he’ll be in the classroom while that investigation continues.

Which creates a fairly uncomfortable situation for Levy’s students.

The media reporting of this case, and maybe the legal wrangling as well, has been nothing short of asinine.

Ken Levy dropping F-bombs on Jeff Landry and Donald Trump is unprofessional and it makes him supremely boring, but that’s not what’s actionable. The local media has focused solely on that, and in doing so they’ve misreported, either intentionally or through incompetence, what this is all about.

What makes Levy’s employment status untenable is a pair of other things he said in that classroom rant which got him in trouble.

He threatened to “put in jail” any students who were recording him, which is an attempt at intimidation and a completely bogus statement of Louisiana law. This is a one-party recording state, which means that if you’re a party to communications you can record them without the other party’s knowledge or consent. Third-party recordings might be less settled, but a student in a classroom in which there is a socratic discussion, which describes every law school class session everywhere in the world, is a participant in that communication and therefore is entitled to record it.

Levy claiming it would be a crime to record him as he prepared to launch into a political rant including vulgarity and boorish, offensive statements is conduct well below the standard any university would expect from its faculty.

What’s so funny, as Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry noted, is that Levy himself had written such boorish statements don’t carry the protection of the First Amendment.

Of course, that apparently only goes one way.

And for Levy and his lawyer Jill Craft to be complaining about the suspension as an affront to academic freedom and his First Amendment rights would come off as…inconvenient, to be sure. Unless he’d try to say that you can shout “F**k Donald Trump!” and “F**k Jeff Landry!” in front of a class full of law students and that isn’t hate speech in the way that saying “Mexicans are lazy” or “Jews are dishonest” is.

Most honest people would reject such an argument and say that while you have a First Amendment right to say all of the offensive things above, they’re pretty damned unprofessional and you can probably expect consequences from saying them.

Yes, however, there are people on the Left who would condemn you as deplorable for making an ethnic joke while cheering on political figures screaming “F**k Trump” on national television. That’s probably one reason why Trump and Landry won so overwhelmingly; the rest of us are fed up with such cognitive dissonance.

And it isn’t ultimately going to fly at LSU Law School.

Landry isn’t letting this go. Here’s what he had to say yesterday…

Imagine sending your child to college for a good education and THIS is the type of test they receive. Disgusting and inexcusable behavior from Ken Levy. Deranged behavior like this has no place in our classrooms!

If tenure protects a professor from this type of conduct, then… pic.twitter.com/Bj5JS3VrsF

— Governor Jeff Landry (@LAGovJeffLandry) February 12, 2025

The image attached to that X post is the storyline from a hypothetical Levy wrote for a law-school exam. Here’s a closer look at those two pages…

You could say in Levy’s defense that it’s a criminal law exam and so the conduct to be discussed within case hypotheticals is naturally going to offend the sensibilities. And you might be right.

On the other hand, how is this not creating a hostile classroom environment? The same guy who casts Republicans as pedophiles is ranting about jailing students who record him, demanding that they listen to his political opinions and then dropping F-bombs on Donald Trump and Jeff Landry?

Most people would say Ken Levy is out of control.

And the LSU Board of Supervisors, at this point, wants him gone because he’s an embarrassment. That board is increasingly a reflection of Jeff Landry’s will as applied to LSU, and one element of Landry’s clear mandate from the people of Louisiana is to do something about the state’s universities being woke indoctrination factories where conservative college and graduate students are made to feel like deplorables and second-class citizens.

Tarvald Smith might have saved Levy’s job for this semester. But the smart play for Levy is to find a new place to teach criminal law when he’s not ranting about politics, because sooner or later they’re going to run him out of LSU Law School.

And as we’ve written, it’s time for the Louisiana legislature to do away with tenure on public college campuses and replace it with multi-year contracts like the universities negotiate with their sports coaches. That’s a bill someone should bring in the upcoming legislative session and all possible pressure should be brought to bear in passing it.

If we really want to use this moment to change America for the better long-term—not merely for the next four years—ending tenure is a must. When will we realize that the drastic damage caused by the institutionalized Radical Left requires bold reform? https://t.co/MKoY932qFP

— Kevin Roberts (@KevinRobertsTX) February 12, 2025