Professor fired after refusing COVID vaccine sues Minnesota Gov. Walz
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…
August 8, 2025
Originally Published in The College Fix