The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that a public library that rejects books because of their viewpoint does not violate the First Amendment, legal scholar Eugene Volokh reports.
Ruling 10-7 in a case involving a county public library in Texas, Little v. Llano County, the appeals court termed library decisions to accept or refuse books “government speech.”
“All Llano County has done here is what libraries have been doing for two centuries: decide which books they want in their collections,” the majority opinion said. “That is what it means to be a library—to make judgments about which books are worth reading and which are not, which ideas belong on the shelves and which do not.”
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