A federal judge in Arkansas has put a temporary stop on the enforcement of a state law that would open up librarians, booksellers, and others to criminal prosecution if they make “harmful” materials available to minors, saying the law was too vague and too broad, and that it would likely be found to be unconstitutional.
A group of librarians, retailers, and organizations, including the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, have challenged the law in court, and in his written opinion, Judge Timothy L. Brooks of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas said they were likely to prevail, noting, “There is no clarity [in the law] on what affirmative steps a bookseller or librarian must take to avoid a violation.”
As Allison Hill, CEO of the American Booksellers Association, said in a statement when the suit was first filed, “Arkansas independent bookstore members could be charged with a misdemeanor (first offense) or a felony (second offense) for selling, displaying, or marketing legal materials in their own bookstores. It is impossible for a bookseller to know the contents of every book in their store and impossible to define ‘harmful’ for everyone” (see “CBLDF, Booksellers, Librarians Challenge Arkansas Law”). Comics retailer Michael Tierney gave a concrete example of the potential dangers of that situation earlier this year (see “Talk Back”).
In their complaint and in statements to the court, some of the plaintiffs said the law was so broad that they fear they would be faced with prosecution unless they either made their stores and libraries adults-only or removed all materials that could be offensive to even very young children. In his written opinion, Brooks pointed out that the law does not distinguish between the youngest children and older minors, and that it was so vague that a retailer or librarian could be prosecuted for having a romance novel with sex scenes on their shelves, even though very young children would be unlikely to read it.
Brooks also placed an injunction on another provision that required libraries to establish criteria and procedures for handling requests to remove books from their collection but gave the final decision to local government officials and imposed no criteria on them. Several librarians told the court that this would give free rein to already existing efforts to remove constitutionally protected materials from their collections. One plaintiff said that he had already received a request to remove “all materials with LGBTQ characters” from his library, and he expects more.
The law, known as Article 372, was set to go into effect on August 1, 2023, but Brooks’ injunction stops the two sections in question from going into effect until the courts make a final determination on the constitutionality of the law.
Source: ICV2
