AUSTIN, Texas — A ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday denied Llano County library patrons First Amendment access to information.
Seventeen books addressing racism and transgender topics were removed from Llano County libraries in 2021 after residents deemed them “obscene” and “pornographic.”
A 2022 lawsuit against Llano County officials in Texas challenged the removal of books from public libraries.
In 2023, a Texas federal judge issued a preliminary injunction ordering the return of the books. In June, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals’ three-judge panel’s divided opinion clouded the future; one judge favored keeping all 17 books, another only 8, while a third proposed the county decide.
“Plaintiffs cannot invoke a right to receive information to challenge a library’s removal of books. Yes, Supreme Court precedent sometimes protects one’s right to receive someone else’s speech,” the ruling on Friday states. “But plaintiffs would transform that precedent into a brave new right to receive information from the government in the form of taxpayer-funded library books. The First Amendment acknowledges no such right.”
The court added that a person cannot use the First Amendment to challenge a library’s choices about acquiring, keeping or discarding books.
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.
In 1995, the Fifth Circuit ruled in Campbell v. St. Tammany Parish School Board that students may challenge the removal of a book from public school libraries and while the present court acknowledges this decision, they state that the decision in Campbell “was based on a mistaken reading of precedent and, since decided, has played no role in similar controversies in our circuit. We therefore overrule Campbell.”
The court stated that the library is deciding what books they want to be in their library and that patrons that wish to have a book that isn’t in the collection “order it online, buy it from a bookstore, or borrow it from a friend.”
The full ruling can be found below.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
