Appeals court rules Texas library can remove books based on content
A federal appeals court ruled that public library patrons in Llano County, Texas, cannot challenge the removal of books and do not have a First Amendment right to information from a public library.
The court's 10-7 decision overturns a prior injunction, stating that a library's collection is a form of government speech and therefore not subject to free speech challenges.
This ruling directly contradicts a similar case in Iowa, setting up a potential challenge in the Supreme Court.
A federal appeals court on Friday ruled that public library patrons in Llano County, Texas cannot challenge the removal of books from the library and do not have a First Amendment right to receive information from a public library, calling a library's collection a form of government speech.
The decision from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturns the decision made by the same court in Campbell v. St. Tammany Parish School, which said students could challenge the removal of books, 30 years ago.
The court ruled 10-7 in a full court decision to overturn an injunction that required a Llano County public library to return 17 books that had been removed from library shelves.
What they're saying
Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan penned the majority opinion where judges decided that the decisions that libraries make surround their collections is government speech and not subject to free speech challenges.
Duncan compared the decision to remove books from a library collection to a museum curating their exhibits.
"Take a deep breath, everyone," Duncan said in the opinion. "No one is banning (or burning) books."
The opinion pointed towards briefs calling for the return of the books claiming the decision would lead to book burnings and "totalitarian regimes" and called the arguments made "unusually over-caffeinated."
"If a disappointed patron can't find a book in the library, he can order it online, buy it from a bookstore, or borrow it from a friend," Duncan wrote. "All Llano County has done here is what libraries have been doing for two centuries: decide which books they want in their collections."
The other side
Seven of the court's judges dissented from the decision calling the removal of the books a "politically motivated" effort to "deny public access to disfavored ideas."
"Public libraries have long kept the people well informed by giving them access to works expressing a broad range of information and ideas," Judge Stephen Higginson wrote in the dissent.
Higginson said the majority judges had forsaken "core First Amendment principles."
In 2021, a group of community members began working to have several books they deemed inappropriate removed from Llano County public library shelves.
A group of seven Llano County residents filed a federal lawsuit against the county judge, commissioners, library board members and the library systems director for restricting and banning books from the three-branch library system.
The lawsuit stated that the county judge, commissioners and library director removed several books off shelves, suspended access to digital library books, replaced the Llano County library board with community members in favor of book bans, halted new library book orders and allowed the library board to close its meetings to the public in a coordinated censorship campaign that violates the First Amendment and 14th Amendment.
According to the suit, the defendants worked together to remove several children's books that they found inappropriate from library shelves in early fall of last year. Then, after state Rep. Matt Krause, R-Fort Worth, notified the Texas Education Agency of a list of 850 books he found objectionable that were found in school libraries, some of the same titles were removed from the Llano libraries.
In 2024, a divided panel from the Fifth Circuit ordered eight of the removed books returned.
Both the majority opinion of the 2024 panel and the dissenting opinion from Friday's decision called the removal of the books a political decision.
The books at issue in the case include "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent" by Isabel Wilkerson; "They Called Themselves the K.K.K: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group," by Susan Campbell Bartoletti; "In the Night Kitchen" by Maurice Sendak; "It's Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex and Sexual Health" by Robie H. Harris; and "Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen" by Jazz Jennings.
Other titles include "Larry the Farting Leprechaun" by Jane Bexley and "My Butt is So Noisy!" by Dawn McMillan.
The decision from the Fifth Circuit on Friday is in direct opposition to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals which ruled in a similar case in Iowa last year.
In the case to decide is Iowa's book ban could go into effect, the appeals court allowed the ban to happen, but ruled that book removal does not fall under government speech.
"Contrary to defendants' contention," Judge Ralph R. Erickson wrote, "the Supreme Court has not extended the government speech doctrine to the placement and removal of books in public school libraries."
The split decisions could lead to a Supreme Court challenge.
The Source
Information on the court's ruling comes from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and court documents. Backstory on the lawsuit comes from previous FOX 7 reporting. Information on the decision of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals' decision comes from the Associated Press.
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