It starts with a parental complaint, or a social media pressure campaign, or a particularly tense library or school board meeting. But increasingly, as the American Library Association (ALA) continues to track record levels of book challenges and bans, censorship disputes are finding their way to courtrooms, where wins or losses can resonate nationwide for years to come.
Theresa Chmara, general counsel for ALA’s Freedom to Read Foundation, and Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, dove into some of these cases and the legal arguments underlying them at “Censorship in the Courts: Current Litigation throughout the United States,” a session of ALA’s 2025 Annual Conference and Exhibition in Philadelphia.
“One argument we’re seeing [to justify censorship] is that a library collection constitutes government speech,” Chmara said, with the implication that governments can make viewpoint-based decisions about acquisitions and removals without running afoul of the First Amendment. In cases like these, courts look at three things: public perception of the speech, the history of the speech, and who controls that speech.
“Our response has been that the public perceives library collections as the speech of authors, who control the opinions and ideas in their own works,” she said. “And historically, libraries have served to provide a broad array of information and viewpoints. In this context, it would make no sense that viewpoints represented in the library are government speech.”
Another common argument for censorship is that there is no inherent right to receive information at the library, though the Supreme Court has found otherwise; a 1982 ruling was not legally binding but has been influential in the decades since.
One of the most prominent ongoing cases is Fayetteville (Ark.) Public Library v. Crawford County, which has hinged on a state statute criminalizing content that is deemed obscene or harmful to minors and leaving librarians and booksellers who “make available” such content vulnerable to prosecution.
ALA celebrated the December 2024 District Court ruling that the statute is unconstitutional, though the decision is now under appeal. “Fortunately,” Chmara pointed out, “while there have been attempts to have criminal actions against librarians, those have been soundly rejected by both law enforcement and by district attorneys.”
Caldwell-Stone mentioned the trend of state legislators introducing bills requiring libraries to disaffiliate from ALA or bar publicly funded entities from purchasing ALA’s materials or services, but those efforts have largely fizzled so far.
“The most troubling bills,” she said, “are the ones that attack the professionalism of library workers, legislation designed to eliminate trained, degreed librarians’ collection development and removal decisions, replacing them with parent advisory boards or citizen committees to oversee the library’s collection.”
All this litigation is expensive, Caldwell-Stone added, with legal fees and settlements that can easily reach six figures. “There are costs involved, and these are conversations you can have with your elected officials and board members, to point out that this is not just simply taking the book off the shelf, and there are very real risks.”
