Twelve days ago, Judge Alan D. Albright issued an injunction to stop the enforcement of Texas Law HB900 (better known as the Reader Act), which would require any vendor who wishes to sell books to the Texas Public School System to provide ratings as to the level of Sexual explicitness, has released a written opinion that states that has stated that the law was unconstitutional.
This court case emerged from a lawsuit that was brought by retailers and organizations such as the CBLDF (Comic Book Legal Defense Fund) asked the court to block the enforcement of the law. The court granted that injunction and Judge Alan D. Albright (a judge appointed by Former President Donald Trump) of the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas denied a motion to dismiss the motion by the defendants, who were Texas Officials.
In his written opinion, Albright stated that the law violated the First Amendment because it was too vague and compelled booksellers to publish book ratings that they may not agree with. The judge also pointed out that it would put a burden on the bookseller, who would have to provide ratings not only for all their new books but also, retroactively, for all books already sold to school districts. “READER’s requirements for vendors are so numerous and onerous as to call into question whether the legislature believed any third party could comply.” The judge also noted that one of the plaintiffs, the Blue Willow Bookstore estimated the costs of rating each book according to state standards would range from $200 to $1,000 per title, and the cost of retroactive rating and any recalls at between $4 million and $500 million, for a store whose annual sales are about $1 million.
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Albright also objected to the unlimited power that the State would give the Texas Education Agency (TEA) to overrule the ratings, the statute provides the TEA unlimited authority to undermine every minute of the work that the vendors put into rating books without providing any blueprint for the standard that will be employed for this review.” In addition, he said, “There is precious little if any language in the statute to ensure that any decision made by the TEA concerning the rating of any book will be any more ‘accurate’ (whatever that means) allowing for the enormous possibility if not probability that it will be entirely arbitrary and capricious (at best). In other words, vendors must decide between either accepting the state administrative agency substituted speech as their own or being effectively blacklisted.”
In conclusion, Judge Albright wrote, that READER misses the mark on obscenity with a web of unconstitutionally vague requirements. And the State, in abdicating its responsibility to protect children, forces private individuals and corporations into compliance with an unconstitutional law that violates the First Amendment. The State of Texas will be appealing the ruling.
Texas Law HB900 (READER ACT) was passed in April 2023 and went into effect in September, many lawmakers, including librarians, were concerned with the law due to the notable rise of laws being introduced that looked to impose severe restrictions on classroom lessons and school activities about gender identity and sexual orientation. According to the Texas Tribune, any library that has books with a sexually explicit label on them will be removed from the bookshelves. And students who want to check out school library books deemed “sexually relevant” would have to get parental permission first.
Source: ICv2
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