Amid a three-year nationwide surge in book bans, 2024 began on a hopeful note for freedom-to-read advocates, with legal victories in book-banning lawsuits in Iowa, Florida, and Texas. But after some early successes, several cases are poised to enter a critical next phase. As the wheels of justice grind on, PW rounded up the status of some of the more closely watched book-banning suits.
Perhaps no lawsuit has generated more attention than the challenge to HB 900 in Texas, which, among its provisions, would have forced booksellers in the state to rate books for sexual content as a condition of doing business with Texas public schools. In January, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld district court judge Alan D. Albright’s decision to block the most odious parts of the law. But a subsequent order from the Fifth Circuit has delivered something of wake-up call for freedom-to-read advocates.
In another closely watched case featuring library books, federal judge Sharon Gleason is weighing whether to order dozens of books taken from library shelves in the Mat-Su Borough School District in Alaska returned while a lawsuit challenging their removal is heard.
Filed in November 2023 by a group of eight plaintiffs, and supported by the ACLU of Alaska and advocacy group the Northern Justice Project, the suit accuses administrators in the Mat-Su district, located just north of Anchorage, of pulling 56 titles from school libraries without any formal review, based solely on a handful of complaints
Freedom-to-read advocates celebrated a big win back in December when a federal judge blocked parts of Iowa state law SF 496, one of the nation’s most contentious book-banning bills. But the state’s appeal to overturn the block is heating up.
Signed into law in May 2023, SF 496 seeks to ban from school libraries all books with depictions of sex as well as all materials and instruction involving “gender identity” and “sexual orientation” for students through sixth grade. But in his December 29 decision, judge Stephen Locher found the bill was “unlikely to satisfy the First Amendment under any standard of scrutiny.”
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