A federal judge in Arkansas has struck down a pro-censorship law that threatened to punish booksellers that sold material deemed “harmful to minors.”
The roots of the case go back to late March of 2023, when Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) signed legislation known as Act 372 into law. Two provisions in the law would have penalized booksellers with up to a year in prison for violating the vaguely worded law.
Booksellers in the state were alarmed. They pointed out that a “harmful” standard is not one recognized or defined by law and charged that the language of Act 372 was dangerously vague. The law, they argued, was designed to give state officials a powerful weapon to use to harass and intimidate bookstores for selling legal material that extremists decide they don’t like for whatever reason.
A few months after Sanders signed the law, a coalition of librarians, booksellers and citizens filed a lawsuit in federal court aided by the nonprofit Democracy Forward. The case is Fayetteville Public Library et al. v. Crawford County, Arkansas et al.
In July 2023, U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks temporarily blocked the provisions in the law from going into effect. On Dec. 23, 2024, Brooks permanently barred those sections from being enforced, calling them unconstitutional.
“If the General Assembly’s purpose in passing Section 1 was to protect younger minors from accessing inappropriate sexual content in libraries and bookstores, the law will only achieve that end at the expense of everyone else’s First Amendment rights,” Brooks observed. “The law deputizes librarians and booksellers as the agents of censorship; when motivated by the fear of jail time, it is likely they will shelve only books fit for young children and segregate or discard the rest.”
Ron Charles, a book critic at The Washington Post, noted that Brooks pointed out that defenders of the law were asking the people of Arkansas “to trust the local governing bodies evaluating book challenges” and not worry about “arbitrary prosecution.”
Charles then asked a compelling question: “But why, we might wonder, should a free people have to put their access to books in the clammy hands of state authorities and radicalized bigots who presume to know what’s in everyone else’s best interest?”
John Chrastka, executive director of EveryLibrary, hailed the ruling.
“This decision sends a strong message that censorship and government overreach have no place in our libraries or our democracy,” Chrastka said. “It’s a win for librarians, for the right to read, and for the Arkansas library communities who have fought tirelessly to protect access to books and ideas. We stand with Arkansas library stakeholders and their co-plaintiffs as leaders in this essential fight for free expression.”