One System of Law

For more than a decade, the conservative movement has spoken in civilizational terms about the primacy of the Constitution, the incompatibility of foreign legal codes with American self-government, and the obligation of the state to defend its institutions against subversion. On April 6, Governor Ron DeSantis signed HB 1471 into law at the University of South Florida in Tampa, converting that language into enforceable statute. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Hillary Cassel (R-Dania Beach), passed the Florida House 80–25 and the Senate 25–11. It takes effect July 1.

The legislation operates on two fronts simultaneously. First, it establishes a formal statutory firewall: Florida courts may not apply or enforce foreign or religious law, including Sharia, when doing so would violate constitutional rights. Foreign judgments, contracts, and legal provisions that attempt to circumvent those protections are voided. Second, it creates an independent state-level counterterrorism framework. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s Chief of Domestic Security is now authorized to recommend the designation of domestic terrorist organizations, with approval required from the governor and the three members of the Florida Cabinet. Federal terrorist designations can be enforced at the state level. Designated organizations face prohibitions on public funding and support, and individuals who provide material support face felony criminal penalties.

The bill’s education provisions are equally direct. Taxpayer funds may not be used to support or promote designated terrorist organizations. Private schools receiving state vouchers cannot maintain affiliations with such groups. College students who promote designated organizations, defined in the statute as statements or actions that support, approve, or encourage violence, risk expulsion, loss of in-state tuition, scholarships, and fee waivers. The mechanism is financial: the state does not criminalize speech but withdraws its subsidy from those who align with entities it has determined to be hostile to the constitutional order.

HB 1471 did not emerge from a vacuum. It builds on a December 2025 executive order in which DeSantis directed state agencies to take all lawful measures to prevent unlawful activity by terrorist organizations, specifically naming the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim Brotherhood. When CAIR-Florida challenged that order, U.S. District Judge Mark Walker issued a preliminary injunction in March blocking its enforcement, ruling that it violated CAIR’s constitutional rights. The legislation represents the governor’s institutional response: rather than govern by executive fiat alone, put the framework through the legislature with bipartisan supermajority support and dare the courts to strike down a duly enacted statute.

Florida is not the first state to address the application of foreign law in American courts. Oklahoma voters approved an explicit anti-Sharia ballot measure in 2010; a federal appellate court struck it down as unconstitutionally discriminatory. That setback prompted a strategic pivot. Subsequent states, including Arizona, Kansas, Louisiana, South Dakota, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Alabama, adopted the “American Laws for American Courts” model, which frames the prohibition in religion-neutral terms. Florida’s bill is the most comprehensive iteration yet: it names Sharia explicitly while also establishing independent state authority to designate and defund terrorist organizations, a power traditionally reserved to the federal government.

The opposition’s response has been predictable in both content and cadence. CAIR-Florida labeled the law “draconian” and announced immediate legal challenges, with Executive Director Hiba Rahim questioning the bill’s origins and warning of overreach. The ACLU has long argued that such bans are unnecessary because existing constitutional safeguards already prevent the application of foreign law that conflicts with American rights. Legal scholars have warned that broadly drafted foreign-law bans can create unintended collateral damage to international commercial arbitration and religious dispute resolution across faith traditions.

These objections are not trivial; serious legislation always generates serious procedural and constitutional questions. But the substantive premise of HB 1471 is not that Sharia courts are operating openly in Jacksonville. It is that the constitutional order requires affirmative institutional defense, not passive reliance on the assumption that no one will ever test its boundaries. In June 2009, a Hudson County, New Jersey family court judge denied a restraining order to a Muslim woman whose husband had repeatedly raped her, ruling that the husband lacked “criminal desire” because he was acting consistently with his religious practices. The New Jersey Appellate Court reversed the decision. But it happened. And institutional boundaries that exist only as unwritten norms are boundaries that can be quietly moved.

The deeper significance of HB 1471 lies in what it represents structurally. For years, the civilizational Right has operated primarily in the register of diagnosis: naming the problem, mapping the institutional capture, cataloging the ideological infiltration. Florida, under DeSantis, has consistently moved from diagnosis to prescription. The anti-DEI legislation. The Parental Rights in Education Act. The Digital Bill of Rights. Each converted a broad conservative concern into specific, enforceable statutory language. HB 1471 is the latest instance of that pattern, and arguably the most consequential, because it addresses a question most states prefer to leave as an abstraction: What happens when a legal tradition fundamentally incompatible with the constitutional order seeks recognition in American courts?

For Florida residents, the practical effects are tangible. Courts will operate under an explicit statutory mandate to apply one system of law. Public money will not flow to organizations the state has designated as terrorist entities. Educational institutions receiving state funds will face clear prohibitions. Whether the statute survives the legal challenges CAIR and its allies have promised is a question the courts will resolve. But the political fact is already established: a state legislature, by decisive bipartisan margins, has declared that constitutional supremacy is not merely a principle to be invoked but a boundary to be enforced.