[March 16, 2026]: Southeastern Legal Foundation (SLF) filed an amicus brief together with Liberty Justice Center urging the entire Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals to rehear a First Amendment challenge to a Minnesota law arguably censoring political speech.

The law targets “deepfakes” that depict someone in such a realistic way that a reasonable person wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. An online content creator and state representative want to challenge the law as targeting their speech, parody “campaign ads” of politicians like Kamala Harris that use AI to replicate features like her voice. A panel of judges on the Eighth Circuit held that the plaintiffs could not bring a First Amendment lawsuit, mainly because the deepfake law does not target parodies.

SLF explains in its amicus brief supporting the plaintiffs how the Eighth Circuit panel did not stick to the text of the Minnesota law when deciding the issue. Textualism requires looking at the text of a law as it is written. “Textualism…rejects broadening or narrowing the reach of a statute to capture what a judge thinks a legislature meant instead of what the words say.” Here, the Eighth Circuit inferred a parody exception to the Minnesota deepfake law, even though parodies are never mentioned in the statute. The plaintiffs should be able to challenge the law because the Kamala Harris video arguably falls within its limits.

Worse, the Eighth Circuit departed from settled First Amendment precedent that a speaker can challenge any law that could be enforced against him, even if it has not actually been enforced yet. First Amendment protections are meant to be broad, but, as SLF warns, the Eighth Circuit is improperly narrowing them and should revisit its opinion.