Despite the hopes of intellectual freedom advocates, on December 8, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Leila Green Little et al. v. Llano County. The lawsuit, filed in April 2022 by patrons of Llano County Library System, TX, challenged the library’s removal of 17 books featuring content on sexuality, gender, and racism—as well as children’s “butt and fart books.”

In a preliminary injunction issued in March 2023, Judge Robert Pitman of the Western District of Texas ordered that the county restore the books to the library’s shelves and catalog, and to cease any further removals. Eight books were returned. And in June 2024, a three-person Court of Appeals panel upheld that decision, ruling two-to-one that removal of the titles based on their content was a First Amendment violation.

The dissenting vote belonged to Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over districts in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. In a May 9 decision reversing the Court of Appeals panel, Duncan ruled that library collection decisions are “government speech” and therefore not protected by the First Amendment, reversing the earlier decisions favoring freedom to read.

In October, the American Library Association (ALA) Freedom to Read Foundation and Texas Library Association submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in support of the plaintiffs, stating that the Fifth Circuit decision is “anathema to longstanding First Amendment principles, chief among them the ‘fixed star’ that ‘no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.’”

A second amicus brief was filed by Penguin Random House (PRH), Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Sourcebooks, and the Authors Guild, urging the Court to review the case and overturn the Fifth Circuit’s ruling that public libraries in the three states can remove books for political or ideological reasons.

The last book banning case to come before the Supreme Court was Board of Education, Island Trees School District v. Pico in 1982, in which school boards attempted to remove 11 books—including Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Richard Wright’s Black Boy—from middle and high school libraries in New York’s Nassau County. While technically a victory for First Amendment rights, the 5–4 plurality decision was not as definitive as plaintiffs and intellectual freedom proponents would have liked, leaving open the potential for the current rash of policy challenges.

“The idea that the First Amendment does not significantly prevent censorship in public libraries poses an existential threat to free expression and serves as a tactical weapon for those seeking to impose ideological control over public collections,” EveryLibrary Executive Director John Chrastka wrote in a post on the organization’s website about Little v. Llano.

He pointed to a similar recent decision upholding the Government Speech Doctrine: the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear Cambridge Christian School v. Florida High School Athletic Association, allowing a lower court ruling that speech over a public football stadium’s loudspeaker is government speech.

“Each refusal to hear these cases emboldens government actors to push the boundaries of censorship while insulating those actions from meaningful First Amendment scrutiny,” he noted. “What is emerging is not a series of isolated disputes but a growing framework of precedents that treats once-protected expression as mere government-controlled messaging.”

THE LONG GAME

While this is a disheartening development for the plaintiffs, Dan Novack, vice president and associate general counsel at PRH, feels that a favorable precedent could still be set at the Supreme Court level. PRH has several cases in play, including Penguin Random House LLC v. Robbins, challenging Iowa’s SF496 in the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, and Penguin Random House LLC v. Gibson, fighting Florida’s HB 1069 in the Eleventh Circuit. Both are scheduled to be heard in early 2026.

Given that it only takes about one percent of the cases put forward to it every year, “when there is a traffic jam of cases, as there is in this emerging area of law, it’s really not uncommon for the Supreme Court to sit back and let it play out,” Novack told LJ. If the other cases are also decided against the freedom to read, the Supreme Court may not see the need to step in. But if rulings are split, it may choose to take on one of the cases.

If the Supreme Court had taken Little v. Llano, it could have resulted in a positive ruling coming sooner. But “I’m taking the longer view that it’s good to be presenting more options to the Court, and if they were to take a Penguin Random House case, I feel very strong about the merits of those cases,” said Novack.

Even Llano County’s attorney, Jonathan Mitchell, in his brief in opposition to the writ of certiorari asking the Supreme Court to review the Fifth Circuit ruling, stated that “The Court should wait and allow these [circuit] courts to weigh in on whether and how the Speech Clause applies to library-book removals before jumping in to resolve this issue.”

Novack acknowledges that this decision is a hard one for Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. “Something went very wrong in the Fifth Circuit,” he said. But PRH and its council are committed to a multi-year fight that could potentially reach the Supreme Court and set precedent for the right to read throughout the United States.

“Although our lawsuit has come to a disappointing end,” Leila Green Little, lead plaintiff in the case, told LJ, “I am encouraged by the many people across the country who continue our fight in the courtrooms, their local libraries, and our state and federal legislative chambers.”