Book Bans

Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster, as well as The Authors Guild and authors including John Green and Jodi Picoult, have filed a new complaint in their suit against a book banning law in Iowa. The case has been litigated since late last year: In December a district court enjoined the law, but after an appeal by the state, the appellate court reversed the decision and sent it back to the district court. The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the previous decision did not properly address whether the law, SF 496, violates […]

Books including And Tango Makes Three will be restored to public school libraries in Nassau County, FL, following the settlement of a lawsuit brought by the authors and local students and parents. In their May complaint, plaintiffs including authors Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson asserted that the school board and district officials “unconstitutionally targeted And Tango Makes Three, a widely acclaimed children’s book containing LGBTQIA+ characters and themes, for removal from the District’s public school library shelves…at the behest of an anti-LGBTQIA+ advocacy group,” Citizens Defending Freedom. CDF challenged 35 other books, including those by Toni Morrison, Khaled Hosseini, Jonathan […]

On Friday, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court’s decision that halted enacting a book banning law in Iowa. The decision, written by Judge Ralph R. Erickson, says that the lower court’s decision was “based on a flawed analysis of the law” and remanded it back to the district court “for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.” The suit, brought by Penguin Random House and joined by Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Sourcebooks, and several authors, challenged an Iowa law that would remove from schools any book that describes or depicts sex, regardless of […]