Judge orders University of Oregon to pay $191,000 to censored conservative professor: lawyers

A federal judge ordered the University of Oregon to pay $191,000 to Portland State University professor Bruce Gilley to cover his legal fees in a successful First Amendment challenge to its censorship of Gilley's comment "all men are created equal" in his retweet from UO's diversity, equity and inclusion office Twitter page, according to Gilley's lawyers.

Gilley secured a preliminary injunction last summer that stops UO Equity's account on X, formerly Twitter, from blocking his interactions or "hiding, muting, or deleting" several kinds of his posts to its account. They settled in full this spring after nearly three years in court, with UO changing some policies, but how much UO would have to pay Gilley in legal fees was still hanging.

The fee award came down Monday from U.S. District Judge John Acosta, Gilley's lawyers at the Institute for Free Speech said Tuesday. IFS initially posted Acosta's letter but removed it after noticing "some confidential information," a spokesperson told Just the News.

UO's insurer United Educators will pay the sum, according to IFS, a typical arrangement in public university litigation. IFS also claimed its state public records request revealed UO had already spent about $533,000 on its own lawyers in the case through November 2024, an amount that has surely climbed since then.

UO didn't immediately answer queries to confirm the fee award or how much it paid its own lawyers.