Lawsuits Are The Way Forward: A Look at Every Current Book Ban Lawsuit

First, the First and Fourteenth Amendments exist. Those both protect intellectual freedom—the ability to access information—and they protect equal access to that information. Information is not just textbooks or research. It’s books and magazines and apps and any other item currently being censored and derided by the book banners (and no amount of trying to rebrand themselves changes the fact they like to ban books).

In addition to the First and Fourteenth Amendments, there’s the Miller Test. This is the legal standard for defining obscenity, and no matter how many times book banners pull the same few panels from Gender Queer out of the book and parade them around, that book and every other one of the several thousand which have been banned do not meet the legal definition of obscenity. There’s no such thing as porn for kids in the library. There’s no such thing as porn for kids being published, period.

The second reason lawsuits are the way forward is that they’re extremely costly. Putting schools, state legislation, and other book banning parties through the process requires deep pockets, and while, indeed, it’s been deep pockets funding the book banning hysteria, there comes the point where the funders evaluate their target and begin to question if it’s worth the cost. In these situations, it’s going to be very expensive and probably not worth their time—especially because they know they’re not going to win on the grounds of the already-enshrined laws governing this country.

That doesn’t mean that lawsuits are going to stop book banning wholesale. What they will do, though, is make it much more difficult. We won’t see as many people showing up to school board meetings in their Moms For Liberty shirts, with “reviews” printed from the Moms for Liberty book review site BookLooks and choreographing performances across the country. They’ll be there, but their fight will not be landing in the same way.

Indeed, none of this is new. We saw it play out in the 1950s and 1960s with the panic around comic books. Going through and reading the report on the Senate Hearing on Juvenile Delinquency—aka, the comic book hearings—is like watching what’s going on now. It’s also like revisiting the moral panic Tipper Gore got involved in during the late ’80s and early ’90s against “porn rock.” They’re moral panics that got a lot of attention, but once the law was actually pulled in, things looked different.

Lawsuits against book banning efforts have been popping up over the last several months. Let’s look at the status of the ones in progress and who is involved in re-righting the freedom of information access for all–particularly the most vulnerable young people who need the books offered to them in school and public libraries. As much as book banners claim these kids can “just get the books at the bookstore/public library,” we know that’s a bold-faced lie. Especially when those same book banners are after those institutions, too.

This list is current as of December 1, 2023. I’ll continue to update throughout the coming year. It is organized by state. The list does not include lawsuits by individuals, though you should get to know the stories of librarians like Brooky Parks and Amanda Jones.