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Gag Order on Tennessee Attorney for Criticizing CoreCivic 
Lifted by Judge

Loaded on July 15, 2025 published in Prison Legal News July, 2025, page 20
Filed under: Retaliation for Media Contact, First Amendment, rights, Gag Order. Location: Tennessee.

Nashville-area attorney Daniel Horwitz will no longer be barred from publicly criticizing a private prison after the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee amended its rules in May 2025. 

The development comes three years after a judge issued a gag order against Horwitz for commenting publicly on a wrongful death lawsuit he pursued against the private prison company CoreCivic. Among other social media posts, Horwitz had written on X that “massively deficient and constitutionally non-compliant staffing” in CoreCivic facilities “is just business as fucking usual.” 

CoreCivic successfully made the case to a federal magistrate judge that the statements were prejudicial. The gag order required Horwitz, a civil rights attorney who had filed numerous lawsuits against CoreCivic, to delete past posts criticizing CoreCivic and to refrain from making public statements about the company. 

As PLN reported, Horwitz, represented by Institute for Justice, sued in federal court to challenge the gag order. [See: PLN, Dec. 2024, p.56.] But while the case was still pending, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee voluntarily changed its rules in May 2025—scrapping the policy Horwitz challenged and ending his gag order. 

“I’m thrilled that my First Amendment rights have been vindicated, but more importantly, I’m thrilled that I can resume informing the public about civil rights abuses across Middle Tennessee,” Horwitz said in an Institute for Justice press release.  

 

Sources: Reason, The Tennessean

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