Legal Victory in Arkansas

News – 1/21/2025

 
We are very pleased to report that Judge Brooks of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas has granted a permanent injunction in Fayetteville v. Crawford County, blocking the implementation of Sections 1 and 5 of Arkansas’ Act 732.

Section 1 of the Act threatened criminal sanctions on library workers for making available to minors any materials deemed “harmful to minors,” and Section 5 empowered local officials to censor materials deemed “not appropriate” for readers.  The court declared both sections of Act 372 unconstitutional on the grounds that the law threatening criminal sanctions on library workers violates their due process rights, restricting access to materials violates library patrons’ First Amendment rights, and that Section 5 placed content- and viewpoint-based restrictions of protected speech without any compelling government purpose.

Judge Brooks also refuted the County’s claim that libraries are government speech. He opined that restricting access to books in a public library due to their content or viewpoint “. . . implicates the First Amendment and does not qualify as protected government speech.” He affirmed the recent holding in GBLT Youth in Iowa Schs. v. Reynolds, 114 F.4th 660, 668 (8th Cir. 2024), noting that the Reynolds court found that, even in school libraries, “which are subject to more government restriction than public community libraries,” “it is doubtful that the public would view the placement and removal of books . . . as the government speaking.”

The Freedom to Read Foundation was a plaintiff in the lawsuit, joining the Fayetteville Public Library; Eureka Springs Carnegie Public Library; the Central Arkansas Library System; the Arkansas Library Association; Advocates For All Arkansas Libraries; the American Booksellers Association; the Association Of American Publishers, Inc.; the Authors Guild, Inc.; the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund; Nate Coulter, Adam Webb, and a group of Arkansas library users to challenge the constitutionality of Act 372.

While we anticipated the result in this case based on Judge Brooks’ preliminary injunction, we are extremely gratified that the court has permanently enjoined the law and upheld the freedom to read in Arkansas libraries, upholding the public library as a First Amendment institution.