National Library Week
April 7, 2025
Room 100, Hutchins Hall
University of Michigan Law School
Library censorship—by which I mean a demand that a public or school library remove a book from circulation because of its content or viewpoint—has been with us for a very long time. It’s my thesis, however, that today we are living through the broadest, most aggressive, and most punitive library censorship effort in the history of the United States. By comparison to current events, the kind of library censorship that we witnessed through most of the twentieth century seems almost quaint.
Library censorship in the last century typically had three limiting qualities. First, such censorship tended to be highly localized. It often involved a relatively small community, where some subset of the population got agitated about a book in a school or public library collection. Local citizens and local officials drove the controversy, which didn’t rise to the state or federal level and usually didn’t become a trend.
Second, through most of the twentieth century library censorship tended to be relatively narrow in focus. It usually targeted a particular book or, at most, the works of a particular author. Also, the objections around these books overwhelmingly related to one issue: their descriptions of sexual behaviors like intercourse and masturbation.
Third, when it worked, library censorship generally yielded a limited and not excessively punitive remedy: The targeted book got removed from the shelves. That outcome may have been bad policy and may have violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the First Amendment—more on that later. But the penalty didn’t put anyone in the unemployment line or in prison.
Now, that sort of limited library censorship that I just described has never gone away and it persists into our own time. We still read occasional news reports about some backwater town that has demanded its public library save the souls of its children by removing Captain Underpantsfrom its collection. But, today, we find ourselves facing something quite different as well—a library censorship effort that is none of these things and that is lots of other—much more dangerous—things.
The stunningly broad, aggressive, and punitive nature of the current library censorship effort makes this a uniquely appropriate time to celebrate National Library Week, to think about our right to read, and to consider the critical role that libraries and librarians play in helping us navigate the turbulent and uncharted waters in which we find ourselves. But let’s start with some detail so we all appreciate just how turbulent and uncharted they are. Spoiler alert: The answer is “very.”
The American Library Association tracks statistics on efforts to ban books from libraries. According to the ALA website, between January 1 and August 31 of last year (the most recent data we have) there were 414 attempts to censor library materials and services. Think about it: That’s more than one attempt every single day of the year to take at least one book out of a library. And those efforts didn’t concern just a few controversial books; they involved more than 1,100 different titles.
Those very high numbers actually signal a decline from 2023, when there were 1,247 documented demands for library censorship, a dramatic uptick driven by censorship surges across seventeen states. Still, the 2024 numbers remain very high when compared to years prior to 2020. So, it’s probably optimistic, and definitely premature, to say we’re seeing a retreat from the unprecedented library censorship effort that started five years ago. The evidence suggests we’re still in the midst of it.
It may have occurred to you that—legal considerations aside—library censorship in this day and age is a futile and seriously stupid idea. You might think, and reasonably so, that it would suffice for us to say to any would-be book-banners: “Meet my little friend, the Internet.” After all, one can instantly and easily find online every book that every zealot has ever dreamed of burning, and then some.
Indeed, many libraries have capitalized on these technologies. The Boston Public Library and the Brooklyn Public Library, among others, maintain “books unbanned” webpages where teens and young adults can get free access to a wide array of challenged books. Library censorship efforts have thus had the ironic effect of making it easier for minors to identify the books that their parents don’t want them to read by collecting them in handy central locations.
There have been angry outcries over these “books unbanned” sites, even though they include nothing that’s shocking or wildly explicit by today’s standards. Indeed, many television shows and video games contain material that’s vastly more offensive. I feel something like pity for the young adult who goes in search of James Joyce’s Ulysses because they’ve heard it was banned for its indecency. Imagine their surprise when they open it to the Proteuschapter and discover those sexually provocative words: “Ineluctable modality of the visible.”
Before I go any further, I should say a little more about the books that tend to get targeted by these efforts. As I mentioned earlier, in many cases the expressed concern relates to a book’s descriptions of sexual activities. Purging books from libraries on this basis poses problems, however, because human beings like to talk about sex, so that sort of thing finds its way into lots of writing. And that includes many books that we view as not just valuable but as pillars of our civilization.
A couple of years ago, a parent protested to Utah’s second-biggest public school system about a book in its library. The complaint provided an eight-page list of objectionable subjects that appeared in the work, including incest, masturbation, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation, fellatio, dildos, and sexual assault. A review committee decided to keep the book in circulation, but only at the high school level due to its vulgarity and violence. The book in question is the Bible.
Books are sometimes banned for reasons other than sexual content. Books containing descriptions of drug and alcohol use have also been targeted. So have dystopian novels like George Orwell’s 1984, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, andLois Lowry’s The Giver (which I’ll say more about later) because of the dark and pessimistic visions of the future they present. That’s another ironic dimension to all this, because what makes many of these books dark and pessimistic is that they imagine a world in which books are banned.
A couple years ago, the Mason City, Iowa, school district decided to out-Orwell Orwell and to use ChatGPT to determine which books it should pull from its shelves. Based on the chatbot’s recommendations, the board removed 19 books (which it did not bother to read), including works by such respected authors as Toni Morrison, Theodore Dreiser, Alice Walker, Sherman Alexie, and Maya Angelou, who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and fifty honorary degrees when she wasn’t busy corrupting our nation’s youth. One commentator, responding to this use of AI, declared: “This dystopian news makes me nostalgic for the olden days, circa 2022, when folks just relied on a coven of religious fanatics to pillage their school libraries.” One might think this would have taught us not to use AI for such purposes; alas, stay tuned.
At present, however, the greatest energy devoted to library censorship doesn’t come from people who are upset about descriptions of intercourse, drug use, or dystopian societies. It comes instead from people who oppose the rights of LGBQT+ persons and it relates to explorations of gender identity. Of the ten books that are currently most often targeted, seven relate to LGBQT+ status—and allof the top five do so.
Our present wave of library censorship therefore isn’t just about taking books off of shelves. It’s about denying that certain people exist. It’s about scrubbing certain people from our societal portrait. It’s about denying specific manifestations of human identity.
A similar effort focuses on books that explore racial, ethnic, and other minority identities and experiences. The federal government’s current campaign against all things “DEI” has given this movement a whole new energy and authority. And it has left whole new piles of wreckage in its wake.
Just this week, the United States Naval Academy took nearly 400 books from its shelves in order to comply with presidential orders to purge DEI-related materials from its collection. This effort resulted in the removal of an award-winning book by Maya Angelou, a book about memorials to the Holocaust, a book about the public rolls of African American women in 19th century New York, and a book about the 2012 shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.
What do those have to do with DEI? Who knows? For that matter, who knows what you’re talking about when you order a library to purge its books on DEI?
One of the many problems with orders of this nature lies in determining which books a cleansing of DEI even includes, given that DEI is not a self-defining term. To go back to an example raised earlier, should such a purge include the Bible? It is, after all, a book thick with messages and stories about diversity, equity, and inclusion. Or should we keep the Bible but redact the worrisome parts, like the Israelites being freed from oppression in Egypt and Jesus spending time with tax collectors, lepers, prostitutes, and sinners?
Given that we’re in a law school I should say a few things about the law, but I may have less to say about it than you’d think. It turns out that the law around library censorship not as clear as we might expect or hope. We have relatively few Supreme Court cases that touch on the issue, and the ones we do have are doctrinally messy.
The case that probably most often comes up in these conversations is Board of Education v. Pico, decided in 1982. That case squarely presented the question of whether the First Amendment imposes limitations on the authority of local school boards to remove books from school libraries because they disapproved of the contents of those books. Alas, it answered the question less squarely than it presented it.
The case resulted in seven different opinions, none of which represented a majority view of the Court. Justice Brennan wrote a plurality opinion recognizing that students have someFirst Amendment right to receive information and that school officials don’t have unlimitedauthority to remove books from libraries. His opinion includes some favorable language. But it also includes less favorable language as well, and the dissent in that case may be more in line with the views of the current Supreme Court.
If we back away from library-specific cases and turn to general principles, First Amendment doctrine seems to send conflicting signals about the proper analysis. On one hand, libraries play a critical role in the dissemination of information and the search for truth—especially today, when they provide many patrons not just with hard copy books and magazines but with a wide range of online services. Libraries are, in a strong sense, “marketplaces of ideas,” and protecting such marketplaces is a key concern of the First Amendment.
Furthermore, library censorship efforts seek to restrain speech based on its content and its viewpoint. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held, however, that content- and viewpoint-based discrimination against speech is strongly disfavored and rarely permissible. In the 1995 case of Rosenberger v. University of Virginia, Justice Kennedy wrote: “The government must abstain from regulating speech when the specific motivating ideology or the opinion or perspective of the speaker is the rationale for the restriction.” The forbidden rationale that Justice Kennedy mentions there is, of course, exactly the rationale behind the library censorship efforts I’m talking about today.
Defenders of library censorship argue that other general principles point in a different direction. One of those principles is that the government cancontrol the content and viewpoint of speech when it is the one doing the speaking. In some of the current litigation over library censorship the government has made exactly this argument—that it gets to choose what its libraries “say” through their collections.
A related principle is that the government has considerable latitude to decide how to spend its resources. A state could conclude, for example, that it doesn’t want to dedicate any of its monetary resources or shelf space to books about Turkish history or the ancient Greek language or medieval alchemy. In the same way, the argument goes, a state can decide that it doesn’t want to buy books about LGBQT+ or racial identities.
These arguments are playing out as we speak in the State of Florida, which has become “ground zero” for library censorship battles. In 2023, Florida passed a law (House Bill 1069) that effectively required a school to remove a book from its library if a parent complained about it. Activist parents realized that all they needed to do to get a book removed from a library was to ask, and so ask they did. In short order, hundreds of titles were yanked from shelves, including classics by Aldous Huxley, Ernest Hemingway, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain.
A flurry of lawsuits followed last year, some against the state, some against local school boards. The legal arguments advanced in these cases vary in their particulars, but in large measure the plaintiffs claim that this law allows for impermissible viewpoint discrimination. The defendants, in turn, take the position that a library’s collection of books is the government’s own speech and therefore not subject to First Amendment scrutiny.
Some of the most significant of these cases are ongoing and are currently bogged down in procedural matters. Others have settled, typically with books going back onto shelves. Those settlements might have disappointed Mark Twain himself, who once gleefully wrote to his business manager that the Concord Public Library had taken Huckleberry Finnfrom its shelves on the basis that it was “trash … suitable only for the slums.” Twain wrote: “That will sell 25,000 copies for us [for] sure.”
There’s an interesting wrinkle in one of the Florida lawsuits. A collection of plaintiffs that includes PEN America and Penguin Random House has sued a Florida school district over its decision to banish or severely limit access to certain books. In a fifty-nine page complaint, the plaintiffs accuse the school district of targeting books based on the viewpoint they reflect, in violation of the First Amendment.
But the more novel, and perhaps more legally intriguing, aspect of the complaint is that it also alleges that the school district disproportionately targeted books written by non-white and LGBTQ+ authors or that address topics related to those identities. As a result, the complaint argues, the school district’s bans also violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In short, the lawsuit claims that this library censorship isn’t just a free speech problem; it’s an equality problem.
Library censorship efforts have recently escalated not just in number but in their punitive nature. In the last few years, threatening librarians with criminal prosecution has become almost commonplace. And, while those threats started at the local level, they have now reached the state level as well.
A local example arrived in 2023 when the Lapeer County, Michigan, Prosecutor threatened to file criminal charges against employees of the area public library if they didn’t remove an LGBTQ+-themed novel from its shelves. The prosecutor argued that the book could entice minors to engage in immoral acts with adults. On the same reasoning, we should immediately arrest every librarian who keeps a copy of Moby Dickin their collection before some reader runs out and violates the international law of whaling.
In the last year, a number of states—mostly in the south—have gone after librarians by revising their obscenity statutes. The threat arises from the fact that, under the Supreme Court’s 1968 decision in the Ginsbergcase, a state has more authority to regulate a minor’s possession of sexually explicit material than it does an adult’s. The test that emerged under Ginsbergis hardly a model of clarity; it allows a state to punish criminally anyone who provides to an underage person material that is “harmful to minors.”
What exactly does “harmful to minors” mean in this context? Who knows? Like DEI, it’s not a self-defining term.
Even constitutional law experts can reasonably disagree about what does, and doesn’t, fall within the Ginsberg standard, and librarians aren’t constitutional law experts. The resulting uncertainty about the risk of criminal prosecution could easily chill a librarian from sharing with a minor any book that might arguably meet this test. In order to avoid putting librarians in the impossible position of resolving complex constitutional questions whenever someone approaches the checkout desk, most state laws took the sensible step of exempting librarians from their Ginsberg-style obscenity law.
In the last couple of years, however, a number of states have removed this exemption, exposing librarians to potential prosecution, fines, and prison if they give the wrong book to the wrong minor. It says a lot about this strategy that when South Dakota proposed such an amendment this past February the media widely referred to it as “the locking up librarians bill.” When the proposed statute failed, it produced headlines that bordered on the surreal, such as: “Senate amends bill, will not send librarians to jail.”
We can’t afford to ignore the gravity of the situation. Threats—even objectively ridiculous ones—can frustrate the sharing of important information. And when librarians have to spend time looking over their shoulder for arrest warrants, we have succeeded in making a dystopian nightmare into a dystopian reality. It reminds me of the sign in the bookstore that says: “Notice: The post-apocalyptic fiction has been moved to current events.”
Some advocates of censorship have realized that they can save themselves the trouble of choosing which books to exclude by simply closing libraries altogether. An early example came right here in Michigan when voters refused to renew funding to the public library in Jamestown Charter Township because of a controversy over a book that addressed LGBQT+ themes. The book primarily at issue was Gender Queer: A Memoir, an illustrated autobiography that has for several years now topped the ALA’s list of books targeted by library censorship efforts.
Things got nasty. Staff members at the library were verbally attacked, threatened, and falsely accused of grooming minors for pedophilia. In the spirit of compromise, the library pledged to include inside every book a description of its contents that patrons or concerned parents could review. That resolved the matter and, on the third try, voters finally approved the library’s budget.
In some instances, the tactic of reducing or eliminating library funding has graduated from the local to the state level. Legislatures in several states have recently threatened to slash millions of dollars from library budgets based on disputes over books. My research suggests that, to date, most states have ultimately backed away from theses crippling cuts.
But now every state will probably need to revisit their library budgets in light of actions just taken at the federal level. In an Executive Order of March 14, President Trump directed the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to reduce what it does to its “statutory functions.” Then, last Monday, he placed the agency’s roughly 75 staff members on administrative leave. These actions put at risk the largest federal funding source for libraries in the United States.
Such funding is critical to the survival of libraries, especially those that are situated in rural communities or embedded in small and under-resourced colleges. Libraries also play an essential role in ensuring that high-speed Internet remains available to people who can’t afford it. Defund libraries, and you deepen the already acute “digital divide.” Defund libraries, and you build economic barriers to entering the marketplaces of ideas.
I want to make one last point about the role that libraries play within our society. Like the funding cuts, this point doesn’t concern censorship per se. But I see it as a censorship-adjacent problem that can have profound effects on the preservation and free flow of information.
The current presidential administration has undertaken an energetic, if not even frenzied, effort to delete disfavored material from on its online sites. Because the government has for so long played such an important role in collecting and preserving all sorts of data—historical, scientific, political—these measures have dramatically reduced public access to vast swaths of information. In response, librarians and others have scrambled to try to preserve the contents of those sites. You can find a detailed account of those efforts in a March 14 article in The New Yorkerentitled “The Data Hoarders Resisting Trump’s Purge: Can librarians and guerilla archivists save the country’s files from DOGE?”
The scope of the cleansing described in the article is stunning, as are the unintended consequences of going at the project with the delicacy of a chainsaw. The article states:
“More than a hundred and ten thousand government pages have gone dark in a purge that one scientist likened to a ‘digital book burning,’ and which has proved as frightening in its imprecision as in its malice. Racing to comply with executive orders banning ‘D.E.I.’ and ‘gender ideology extremism,’ agencies have cut materials on everything from supporting transgender youth in school to teaching children about sickle-cell disease, which disproportionately affects people of African descent. But they have also axed records having little to do with the Administration’s ideological priorities, seemingly assisted by A.I. tools that flag forbidden words without regard to context. A recently leaked list of pages marked for deletion on military websites includes references to the Enola Gay—not, as it turns out, a member of the L.G.B.T.Q. community but, rather, the B-29 bomber that nuked Hiroshima.”
I mentioned earlier that it’s hard to know what DEI means in these contexts. There may exist in the world a worse idea than relying on AI to define it, but, if there is, then it doesn’t occur to me.
These developments remind me of Lois Lowry’s dystopian novel, The Giver, which I mentioned earlier. In that book, the government has driven all of its citizens toward a condition of sameness. This requires a loss of cultural memory, a loss of understanding all the things that make us individually unique and different from each other. One rogue figure, called the Receiver of Memory, takes on the responsibility of preserving within himself all of the thoughts and ideas that preceded the push toward orthodoxy and homogeneity.
At present, librarians and, as The New Yorkerputs it, “guerilla archivists” are playing the role of the Receiver of Memory, challenging the movement toward sameness, preserving our intellectual history and resisting the compelled loss of cultural memory. It’s nothing less than a heroic effort to keep ideas and information within the marketplace and available to everyone. Historians tell us that, when one civilization wants to obliterate another, it often does so by destroying its libraries and archives. The efforts of librarians and archivists described in The New Yorkerarticle seem like a valiant attempt to keep us from obliterating ourselves.
We’re gathered in a law school so I suppose law should get the last word. In that spirit, I’ll close with one final Supreme Court case. It’s not a case directly about library censorship. But I think it’s highly relevant.
In 1943, the Supreme Court of the United States issued its decision in West Virginia State Board of Education v Barnette. In that case, a board of education required teachers and students to participate in a mandatory flag salute as part of their school day. When the children of some Jehovah’s witnesses refused, the school sent them home and threatened them and their parents with further action.
The Supreme Court rejected the state’s authority to compel the students to participate in the ritual. In a powerful opinion written by Justice Robert Jackson, the Court declared: “Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.”
The Court went on to say:
“[F]reedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order. If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion …”
In my view, Barnette provides an important gloss on our rights under the First Amendment. Yes, we get to decide for ourselves what we do—and don’t—want to read, to say, to think, and to believe. But that’s not just because it’s a better way to find the truth. It’s also because doing otherwise—allowing the government to tell us what to read, to say, to think, and to believe, in the interest of some grand sameness or conformity or orthodoxy—is an offense to the individual human conscience.
And the individual human conscience is divine and sacred stuff.
To sum things up: In my view, the library censorship efforts we’re witnessing today aren’t just an attack on our right to read. They’re an attack on identity. An attack on diversity. An attack on equality. An attack on inclusion. An attack on memory. An attack on individuality. And an attack on conscience. And the broad, national, and highly punitive nature of that attack is unprecedented in our lifetime.
Heinrich Heine famously wrote: “Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.” We might in the same vein say that “where they close libraries, they will also necessarily close minds.” National Library Week is a good occasion to remember that the well-being of our nation depends on both libraries and minds remaining open and free.
Whether libraries and minds do so is up to us. We will preserve them, if we can, only through our determination, our commitment, our vigilance, and our courage. As Justice Brandeis observed, “The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people.” In the same vein, the greatest menace to libraries, and to the right to read, is our indifference.
As with all things, we cannot prevail over that which we will not even resist.
