In a huge win for the freedom to read, a federal judge has ruled that Texas House Bill 900, the “Restricting Explicit and Adult-Designated Educational Resources Act (READER Act),” was unconstitutional.

“It’s a momentous decision,” said Jeff Trexler, interim director of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF), which was one of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs along with two Texas independent bookstores—BookPeople and the Blue Willow Bookshop—the American Booksellers Association, the Association of American Publishers, and the Authors Guild. “It’s one that sends a signal to booksellers everywhere that it’s still safe to sell the texts to Texas schools. This is incredibly important. Texas has such a huge impact on the market nationwide.”

The READER Act would have required book vendors to put content ratings on books they had sold or wanted to sell to schools, categorizing books that reference sex as sexually explicit or sexually relevant based on standards set by the Texas State Library and Archives Commission. Schools couldn’t buy books deemed sexually explicit and had to remove those that were previously purchased from shelves. The law also required parental consent for any books deemed sexually relevant (titles that refer to sex but are part of a curriculum required text).

The conclusion to the October 21 federal court ruling read: “The Court agrees with Defendant that Texas has a strong interest in regulating what children can access in schools and preventing inappropriate content from schools. But READER’s methods are not the way to further that interest. Plaintiffs are correct that READER is unconstitutional as it compels speech, is void for vagueness, and is an unconstitutional prior restraint. Plaintiffs are therefore entitled to summary judgment and a permanent injunction against certain provisions of READER. Defendant is not entitled to summary judgment, because Plaintiffs’ First and Fourteenth Amendment claims are all successful.”

The two-year legal battle is not over, however. The Texas Education Agency commissioner filed an appeal to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on October 23. The Fifth Circuit previously ruled in the plaintiff’s favor in this case, in January 2024, when it affirmed the district court’s preliminary injunction of the ratings law.

Ratings are a particular concern for the comics industry, which was one of the reasons CBLDF joined this suit.

“We look at suits on a case-by-case basis,” said Trexler, who notes that the organization must weigh the investment in time and money.

There was no doubt here, however, as the stakes were too high. The comics industry has a history with ratings, most notoriously the Comics Code, which put a “seal of approval” on covers for decades, negatively impacting the creators, business, and reputation of comics.

Trexler also viewed the READER Act as the next step in censorship efforts after a Virginia case that tried to declare two books—Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe and A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas—obscene for children and to restrict their distribution to minors, including at bookstores and libraries. Trexler was representing Kobabe as defense counsel in that case. When they won, he remembers the lawyer for the defendant saying that while he may or may not appeal that decision, he was going to pursue government ratings on books.

“One thing about book bans, [they] continually evolve,” Trexler said. “One way they were going to evolve was by proposing legislation [for] government-mandated ratings.”

The READER Act was “the sequel to what happened to our victory in Virginia."

So how does Trexler see the fight evolving now? The goal of these censorship efforts, Trexler says, includes broadening the definition of obscenity to not consider the work as a whole or on its literary merit (as required by the Miller Test, established in the 1973 Supreme Court decision Miller v. California). This would be particularly harmful for comics that could be declared obscene for a single image, even if the work as a whole could no longer be considered.

In addition, those fighting to limit access will seek to have schools and public libraries declared government speech, which would offer them no First Amendment protections; continue to attack the right to read; and push laws that would make books about specific subjects deemed harmful to minors.

And while they won’t win every case or appeal, it’s a process with a long-term goal. Trexler sees a parallel to the efforts to overturn Roe v. Wade.

It took decades of pushing the boundaries on the interpretation of Roe, he says. Statutes and decisions would go up through the courts and get shot down. Eventually, in 2022, the Supreme Court overturned decades of precedent and Roe.

“This battle is happening once again with obscenity law [and] what constitutes material harmful to minors,” Trexler said.