Judge’s Florida book ban decision is a ‘total knockout’ in censorship fight, lawyer says

A legal victory to overturn a Florida book-banning law won’t instantly return books on the shelves, but it will help shift the momentum to fight censorship, according to a publishing company attorney.

“If a district did not put the books back, then they are risking a lawsuit,” said Dan Novack, a vice president and associate general counsel for Penguin Random House. “If you don’t do the right thing, a student or a parent or an author or publisher or an educator can vindicate their rights now.”

A federal judge ruled earlier this week that the state’s 2023 law on banning pornographic books is too broad and violates the First Amendment.

The world’s biggest publishers — as well as several bestselling young adult authors and two parents from Florida — united to file a federal lawsuit last year in the U.S. District Court and argued that part of HB 1069 is unconstitutional. They sued state officials as well as the School Boards in Orange and Volusia counties.

“Many non-obscene books have been removed from public school libraries to the dismay of students that deeply identify with these books,” Judge Carlos Mendoza wrote in a 50-page order.

Court records listed several beloved classics getting pulled from the shelves, including “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker, “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison and “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood.

“None of these books are obscene,” Mendoza wrote.

The judge noted that some books are removed because of a single sentence without considering the context of the entire work.

“Authors frequently employ literary devices like symbolism and metaphors to convey messages or themes or to advance the plot of the work,” Mendoza wrote. “Given those literary devices, it’s not clear how the State expects Educational Media Specialists, educators, or other school officials to know exactly what crosses the line in the State’s eyes. The vagueness of the provisions only serves to expand their sweep.”

“The Florida Department of Education also directs educators to ‘err on the side of caution,’ which has led many Educational Media Specialists and other educators and school officials to err on the side of removing books based on fear that they and their school districts will be punished. … And the harms extend beyond that of chilling of speech.”

Novack called the ruling “a total knockout,” although he expects the state to appeal, so the litigation will continue.

When reached for comment, Florida Department of Education spokesperson Nathalia Medina said, “We remain unwavering in our commitment to defending parental rights and protecting children from exposure to inappropriate content. This is a fight we are determined to win, no matter how hard the activists work to try to stop us.”

Novack said the publishers did not sue for damages, nor did their lawsuit seek to challenge a harmful to minors standard in Florida law, which already outlaws obscene books.

“The goal of our litigation here was always to take that (HB 1069) off the table and get back to a place where we have to talk to the districts about what an appropriate collections policy looks like,” Novack said. “There’s an opening here to educate the Legislature that truly pornographic material is not allowed in libraries. It’s not something that we would ever seek to publish for young people, nor that librarians would seek to bring in.”

Even as the publishers and authors filed their lawsuit in 2024, Florida lawmakers continued to raise concerns over inappropriate books in schools and proposed new legislation during this Legislative Session.

Complaining about graphic books this year, Rep. Doug Bankson said, “If I took a picture of one of these pages and sent it to a minor, I would go to federal prison.”

The Apopka Republican filed a bill that would forbid School Districts from considering the literary, artistic, political, or scientific value as a basis for keeping books that were deemed harmful to minors. The bill passed the House this year, but failed to clear the Senate.

Novack scoffed at the debate. Kids today aren’t going into the library to get sexually titillating material. They are just going on their smartphones, he said.

The six publishing companies that sued are Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Publishers, Hachette Book Group and Sourcebooks, as well as Orlando native John Green, author of “Paper Towns” and Laurie Halse Anderson, author of “Speak,” and others.

“We’ve shown that we can be successful in the courts,” Novak said after the publishers won a similar lawsuit in Iowa and are awaiting a decision in Idaho.