Legal battle continues for fired professor suing Walz over COVID vax mandate

(The College Fix) — Nearly five years since the COVID-19 virus took the world by storm, those claiming injury from government vaccine mandates continue to come forward with new cases for litigation.

Such is the position of Professor Russell Stewart (pictured), who lost his job after his opposition to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s vaccine mandates.

Now, the professor is suing the Democrat governor and leaders of Lake Superior College, a public community college in Duluth.

On Tuesday, his lawyers at the New Civil Liberties Alliance appeared before U.S. District Court Judge Kate Menendez, asking the court to reject the plaintiffs’ request to dismiss the case.

Lead counsel Jenin Younes expressed optimism about the outcome in an email afterward to The College Fix.

There’s a strong precedence for Stewart in case law, she said.

“In the Eighth Circuit, the government is given less deference to impose measures to combat health-related threats after the immediate emergency has passed,” Younes said.

Walz’s mandate was not issued until over a year after COVID-19 appeared, the lawsuit states. In 2021, the governor issued a decree requiring that all state employees must either be vaccinated or comply with weekly testing measures.

Stewart, a philosophy professor at the college for 30 years, believed that such a requirement was both unconstitutional and unnecessary, and refused, according to the lawsuit.

As a result, he was censured for his nonconformity. He was placed on unpaid administrative leave until he would conform to the mandates, was barred from campus, and banned from teaching his classes, including his online classes, the complaint states.

“As Prof. Stewart argued during multiple disciplinary hearings, it made no sense to force him to get a vaccine that did not stop transmission, especially once he acquired immunity to Covid-19 in December 2021,” according to a case summary by New Civil Liberties Alliance.

After a disciplinary hearing with college administrators, Stewart emailed his students to inform them that he would be indefinitely absent from class and criticized LSC’s policy choices. He was terminated from his job shortly after, according to the lawsuit.

Younes said a central argument to the case comes from Jacobson v. Massachusetts, a 1905 Supreme Court case that has often been used to justify vaccine mandates.

“We argue that Jacobson only should be applied to situations in which the vaccine or other health-related requirement prevents transmission of a virus, and the Covid-19 vaccines do not,” she said.

Younes said courts in the past have “incorrectly interpreted” the case, allowing the government “virtually unfettered power to impose mitigation measures—effective or not—during a pandemic.”

“This,” she said, “has led to chipping away at Americans’ civil liberties.”

At the hearing Tuesday, the judge “was very open-minded about the Jacobson question (ie whether Jacobson essentially instructs courts to rubber stamp vaccine mandates),” Younes told The Fix.

“She was also interested in the First Amendment issue and seemed skeptical of the government’s claim that we had to show the professor’s email to his students was a but-for cause of his termination at this stage of proceedings, and receptive to my argument that it was a mixed motive, since the college cited both his refusal to submit to the vaccine/testing protocol and the email as reasons for his termination in the letter firing him,” she said.

Younes said she expects a ruling within the next two months.

She told The Fix the outcome of Stewart’s case could have important implications for others who have had similar experiences.

“If he wins on the vaccine-related claims, public employees who were fired in Minnesota for refusing to comply with the Governor’s vaccination/testing protocol would likely be able to bring similar claims,” Younes said in her email.

When asked why the case is important, her words were passionate. “People all over the country were forced to receive a vaccine that had not been tested adequately, and which the manufacturer knew did not stop transmission, with the alternative of losing their jobs—which for most working Americans is not a viable option,” she said.

Neither Gov. Walz’s office nor Lake Superior College responded to two emailed requests for comment about the lawsuit.

When asked for an outside perspective on the case, two law professors gave differing opinions.

Professor Robert Destro at the Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law expressed general agreement.

“The facts that have been developed since the Governor’s order make it clear that those pushing the vaccines, including the FDA, knew that it neither a) stopped transmission; nor b) prevented or shortened the disease. Thus, not only was there no ‘compelling interest’ for the order; there was no ‘rational basis’ for it,” he said in a recent email to The Fix.

Destro said that as long as courts treat Stewart’s case like any other civil rights case, his claims appear to hold water. “The Governor’s order is based on a ‘narrative’ about the ‘vaccine’ (assuming it’s actually a ‘vaccine’), not on the science. Without a scientific basis for the order, there is nothing beyond force,” he said.

However, law Professor John Banzhaf of George Washington University gave a different perspective in a recent phone interview.

“In general, courts don’t second-guess agency decisions,” Banzhaf told The Fix.

He said schools and other organizations have implemented similar requirements, such as polio vaccination mandates, for years. As long as the mandates are reasonably grounded in generally accepted science, courts have typically supported them, Banzhaf said.

“You want to err on the side of caution,” he told The Fix. If the school began making exceptions for people, he said, it would become practically impossible for it to mitigate risk of transmission.

Compounded with that, Banzhaf said, is the fact that “when you have an employee, you’re making an investment in that employee, and you stand to lose an awful lot,” if that employee is unable to work due to a COVID-19 infection.

Banzhaf also expressed skepticism about the free speech component of the lawsuit.

“If what [Stewart] said was a private grievance rather than airing something like a public controversy, and if he did not have a duty [as an employee] to do that, then his argument … is very, very weak,” he said.

This article was originally published by The College Fix and reprinted here with permission. 

WATCH: Alpha News reporter Liz Collin previously interviewed Russell Stewart on her podcast in October 2024. 

 

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