Oral arguments began today in the Book People v. Wong case against Texas’s READER book banning law before a panel of judges. The defense largely argued that the plaintiffs’ claims aren’t ripe, and that their assertations of harm are not sufficient. Judges often asked about the definitions of “sexually explicit” and “sexually relevant,” since booksellers would be barred from selling books categorized as such to public schools. While defense attorney Kateland Jackson explained that the definitions come from the penal code, plaintiffs’ counsel Laura Lee Prather argued that those definitions are “cherry picked” from the penal code, mostly dealing with […]
