TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Major publishing companies and authors Friday argued that a federal judge should deny Florida’s request to dismiss a lawsuit over the removal of school library books, saying a controversial state law violates First Amendment rights.
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Attorneys for the publishing companies, authors and other plaintiffs filed a document that, in part, disputed a state position that selection of school library books is “government speech” and, as a result, is not subject to the First Amendment.
“First, school libraries have not historically communicated messages from the state. Instead, school libraries have long served as vehicles to expose students to a broad array of ideas from authors who express unique, personal points of view. … Second, messages conveyed in school library books are diverse and contradictory — not endorsed by the state, as government speech must be,” said the document, which responded to a Nov. 15 state motion to dismiss the case.
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Also, the plaintiffs’ attorneys wrote that numerous courts have held First Amendment rights exist in libraries.
“Here, the challenged statutory provisions impose a statewide mandate from Florida legislators to librarians, educators, and school districts that has resulted in the removal of hundreds of books,” the document said. “These provisions eliminate the traditional discretion that librarians, schools, and school districts have had by requiring them to remove books that they had selected for library shelves based on educational criteria, community standards, and the value of each book as a whole.”
Six publishing companies, The Authors Guild, five authors and two parents filed the lawsuit Aug. 29 in federal court in Orlando. It is one of a series of lawsuits stemming from a 2023 state education law and related decisions by school districts to remove books from library shelves or to restrict access.
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The lawsuit centers on parts of the law (HB 1069) that seek to prevent availability of reading material that is “pornographic” or “describes sexual content.”
In the Nov. 15 motion to dismiss the case, lawyers in Attorney General Ashley Moody’s office focused, in part, on the issue of library books as government speech.
“When the government selects materials to make available in a public-school library, it conveys that, in its view, those materials are of the ‘requisite and appropriate quality’ and will ‘be of the greatest direct benefit or interest to the community’ served,” the motion said, partially quoting a legal precedent. “The government, through public-school-library staff, effectively controls this message because it exercises final approval authority over book selection.”
Also, the motion to dismiss the case said the plaintiffs’ First Amendment claims “fail because the government does not generally violate the First Amendment when it withdraws a benefit that merely facilitates the exercise of a constitutional right.”
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“The First Amendment does not require the government to provide access to particular materials in public-school libraries or to have school libraries at all,” the state’s lawyers wrote. “The students are free to access those books elsewhere, and authors and publishers can still distribute their books to students through bookstores or other libraries.”
The lawsuit names as defendants the State Board of Education and members of the Orange County and Volusia County school boards.
In the filing Friday, the plaintiffs’ attorneys described as overbroad the part of the law barring access to material that “describes sexual conduct.”
“The prohibition on books that contain content that ‘describes sexual conduct’ violates the First Amendment,” the document said. “This provision is overbroad because it encompasses any book with any content that describes sexual conduct without regard to the Supreme Court’s standard for content that is obscene for minors, which is not reasonable in light of the purpose of school libraries.”
The lawsuit cited removals from library shelves of numerous books, such as “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison and “Love in the Time of Cholera” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Both of those authors were awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for their novels and other work.
The plaintiffs in the case are publishing companies Penguin Random House LLC, Hachette Book Group, Inc., HarperCollins Publishers LLC, Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC, Simon & Schuster, LLC and Sourcebooks LLC; The Authors Guild; authors Julia Alvarez, John Green, Laurie Halse Anderson, Jodi Picoult and Angie Thomas; and parents Heidi Kellogg and Judith Anne Hayes.
The case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Carlos Mendoza.
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