A law in Arkansas that threatened librarians and booksellers if they were found to have provided “harmful” content to minors has been struck down by a federal judge over concerns related to free speech.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks ruled that two parts of the law, stating booksellers’ and patrons’ First Amendment rights, used overly broad and vague language. In 2023, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R-AR) signed into law Act 372, joining other conservative states and counties in the United States that have looked to restrict the availability of certain kinds of books to minors, mostly those with themes centered on race and LGBTQ matters.
“Up until the passage of Act 372, it appears that Arkansas’s more pressing concern with respect to librarians was that they be insulated from meritless claims and time-wasting prosecutions,” Brooks wrote. “Times have changed.”
The judge ruled that if the statute’s purpose was to “protect younger minors from accessing inappropriate sexual content in libraries and bookstores, the law will only achieve that end at the expense of everyone else’s First Amendment rights.”