Seventh Circuit, Anderson Federation of Teachers v. Rokita: Indiana's teacher dues-deduction rules and the First Amendment

What happened

On November 2, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit decided Anderson Federation of Teachers v. Rokita, No. 23-1823, an appeal from the Southern District of Indiana. Judge Lee wrote the opinion for a panel of Judges Sykes, Hamilton and Lee. No judge wrote separately. It affirmed the district court's judgment and its permanent injunction against Indiana's enforcement of Senate Enrolled Act 251 and Senate Enrolled Act 297.

Indiana lets any employee have union dues deducted from pay. SEA 251 added requirements that apply only to "school employees," which the opinion reads as public school teachers. A teacher must sign an authorization form carrying a state-written statement about the right not to join or pay a union, renew the authorization every year, and confirm the request from a work email address. The school employer must also send teachers a yearly notice of their right to leave the union. After the district court preliminarily enjoined the original form statement, SEA 297 rewrote it to begin: "The State of Indiana wishes to make you aware that you have a First Amendment right, as recognized by the United States Supreme Court, to refrain from joining and paying dues to a union."

Three teachers' unions and several of their members claimed the laws violate the First Amendment's guarantees of free speech and free association.

What the opinion says

Compelled speech. The court held that the revised statement is government speech. Applying the factors from Shurtleff v. City of Boston (2022), it found that "the statement in question originated with the government, the government controlled the message, and a reasonable person reading the statement would conclude that it is the government that is speaking." It distinguished West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943) and Wooley v. Maynard (1977), in which "the government is requiring an individual to act as a conduit for its message." Here, the court wrote, "it is the State of Indiana—not the teacher—that is doing the informing," so the form requirement "does not violate the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment."

Freedom of association. The parties agreed that processing payroll deductions is a government subsidy of speech and that conditions on a subsidy must be viewpoint neutral. The court agreed with the State that the added requirements are "facially viewpoint neutral," but said facially neutral rules can be a "facade for viewpoint-based discrimination," quoting Cornelius v. NAACP Legal Defense Fund (1985). It held that Janus v. AFSCME (2018) "has no relevance" because the affected teachers "have already consented to join and subsidize a union." On the State's interest in avoiding mistaken deductions, it wrote: "one would think that the State would impose additional hoops on all public employees rather than just teachers." It distinguished Ysursa v. Pocatello Education Ass'n (2009) and its own Wisconsin Education Ass'n Council v. Walker (2013), noting that SEA 251 and SEA 297 "selectively target teachers and teachers' unions to the exclusion of all others." It concluded that "selectively conditioning access to that subsidy for public school teachers and their unions alone is indicative of viewpoint discrimination that the State has done nothing to rebut," and agreed "with the district court's finding on this record that SEA 251 and SEA 297 effectuate viewpoint discrimination."

Strict scrutiny. Because the State argued only that the requirements were "rationally related" to its interests and "stops short of arguing that these interests are 'compelling' or that it could not achieve these interests in less burdensome ways," the court held that "the State may not impose additional conditions to receive the benefit of automatic payroll deductions solely because the requesting employee is a teacher."

The other side

There was no dissent. As the opinion describes them, Indiana argued that payroll deduction is a subsidy the State may offer to some unions and not others "so long as it does not favor one viewpoint over another," and that a law aimed at teachers as a group cannot discriminate by viewpoint because teachers "often have many diverse (sometimes conflicting) opinions." It relied on Janus, Ysursa and Walker, and described its interest as reducing the risk of deducting dues from teachers who do not want to be in a union and shielding employers from liability. The court accepted that the First Amendment does not require equal subsidies and that the laws are facially neutral.

The teachers and unions argued that signing the form compelled them to adopt the State's message. The court rejected that claim as to the revised form, as the district court had.

Where it sits in the record

The opinion rests on the First Amendment and on Supreme Court decisions on compelled speech (Barnette, Wooley), government speech (Shurtleff), subsidies of speech (Ysursa, Rosenberger v. Rector) and speaker-based restrictions (Citizens United v. FEC).