Portions of an Arkansas law that would have subjected librarians to criminal charges for letting kids check out books deemed “harmful to minors” were struck down by a federal judge last week, who ruled that parts of the law violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
Act 372 , signed into law by Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) in March 2023, requires public libraries to allow citizens to challenge library materials. Each challenge must undergo a lengthy review process, and challenged books may be moved to an area off-limits to minors.
The law also states that anyone who provides material deemed “harmful to minors”— defined as showing “nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, or sadomasochistic abuse” while also being in the prurient interest, patently offensive, and lacking “literary, scientific, medical, artistic, or political value for minors”—is guilty of a misdemeanor offense, punishable by up to a year in jail.
In June 2023, a group of Arkansas public libraries, bookstores, and publishing groups filed a lawsuit challenging the law. The group argued that the threat of criminal prosecution “necessarily [forces] libraries and bookstores to confine to a secure ‘adults only’ area—and so to segregate from their general patrons and customers—any item that might be deemed harmful to the youngest minor, even if there is no constitutional basis for limiting its availability to older minors or adults. Where libraries and booksellers lack the space or resources to construct ‘adults only’ areas, their only choice will be to remove all materials which might be deemed harmful to their youngest, least developed patrons or customers.”