US federal judge stops enforcement of Iowa school book ban again – JURIST

A US federal judge on Tuesday once again blocked enforcement of an Iowa law that required the removal of books describing sexual acts from public school libraries.

US District Judge Stephen Locher issued the preliminary injunction after reconsidering the law, known as Senate File 496, under instructions from a federal appeals court that had vacated his earlier injunction. The judge reaffirmed his conclusion that Iowa’s law banning books is “facially unconstitutional,” preventing officials from enforcing it while litigation continues.

The disputed measure, signed by Governor Kim Reynolds in 2023, directed public school libraries to remove any books containing “descriptions” of sex acts. That standard, Judge Locher wrote, went beyond the US Supreme Court’s well-established precedent on obscenity for minors. Judge Locher acknowledged that not all books with sexual content are appropriate for every age group and that prior federal court decisions could justify restricting explicit material for younger students. However, he emphasized that Iowa schools were already doing that. The evidence, he noted, shows that school officials had long been limiting younger students’ access to age-inappropriate books well before Senate File 496 came into play.

He emphasized that Iowa’s new legislation:

​makes no attempt to evaluate a book’s literary, political, artistic, or scientific value before requiring the book’s removal from a school library and thus comes nowhere close to applying the ‘obscenity’ standard that is typically used to determine the constitutionality of statewide book restrictions. The result is the forced removal of books from school libraries that are not pornographic or obscene.

Judge Locher pointed to dozens of well-known titles already pulled from shelves, including “1984” by George Orwell, “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou, “Looking for Alaska” by John Green, and “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison. Most, he found, “are not pornographic or obscene,” making the mandated removals unconstitutional. “The result,” Locher wrote in his ruling, “is the forced removal of books from school libraries that are not pornographic or obscene.”

In returning the case to Judge Locher last summer after blocking the same law in December 2023, the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit instructed the judge to apply the balancing test from Moody v. NetChoice, a recent Supreme Court ruling on speech regulation. That test requires courts to compare a law’s “constitutional” applications against those that are not. Applying that framework, Judge Locher concluded in his Tuesday ruling that the number of improperly removed books far outweighs any constitutionally valid removals the law might achieve. Students, authors, and book publishers, he wrote, had shown a “substantial” threat to their First Amendment rights, thereby justifying the continuation of a preliminary injunction.

Penguin Random House’s prominent authors, including John Green and Jodi Picoult, and advocacy groups brought the challenge. They argued that their works were being stigmatized and that removing them from school libraries blocked students from valuable sources of information, learning, and diverse perspectives.

Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird, whose office is defending the law, criticized the injunction and indicated the state may appeal. “As a mom, I know how important it is to keep schools a safe place for kids to learn and grow,” Bird said in a statement. “Parents shouldn’t have to worry about what materials their kids have access to when they’re not around. This common sense law makes certain that the books kids have access to in school classrooms and libraries are age-appropriate.”

The ruling comes amid a broader national conversation over book bans, student access to information, and what constitutes “obscene” material in schools. For now, his order keeps books that had been targeted for removal back on the shelves, pending litigation on the merits of the First Amendment claims.