On March 25, U.S. District Court judge Stephen Locher of the Southern District of Iowa reinstated an injunction against book restrictions in Iowa Senate File 496, a 2023 state law that has resulted in the removal of hundreds of books from Iowa public school libraries. Locher concluded “that Senate File 496 is likely facially unconstitutional under the First Amendment,” enjoining state defendants against enforcing the law’s provisions to remove library books and penalize educators.
Plaintiffs in the case include the Big Five publishers, the Authors Guild, and the Iowa State Education Association, alongside four authors—Laurie Halse Anderson, John Green, Malinda Lo, and Jodi Picoult—and two Iowa educators, a student, and a parent. “We applaud the Court's decision to return thousands of books to Iowa school libraries,” said Penguin Random House, which was first among the Big Five to file a lawsuit over the law in November 2023, in a statement. “We will continue to defend the rights of authors, students, librarians, and educators.”
Locher’s language in the 40-page order points to book industry concerns beyond Iowa’s borders. The plaintiffs have standing in the case, Locher wrote, “because they are ‘stigmatized’ by the removal of their books from public school libraries in Iowa” and “due to the alleged impact on their First Amendment rights.” He observed that the publishers and authors were curtailed in “their ability (or lack thereof) to communicate with their intended audience” and suffered harm when accused of peddling pornography and obscenity.
In response to the ruling, the Iowa Department of Justice issued a statement calling SF 496 “a critical Iowa law that ensures the books in K–12 schools are age-appropriate.” Iowa state attorney general Brenna Bird added: “Parents shouldn’t have to worry about what materials their kids have access to when they’re not around.”
Sam Helmick, community and access coordinator at the Iowa City Public Library and president-elect of the American Library Association for 2025–2026, questioned the imprecise definition of “age-appropriate,” calling Locher’s injunction validating. “I’m relieved that the judge has agreed with us twice now,” they said. Still, ever since 2023, “the chilling has been taking effect across the state,” Helmick noted, arguing that harm has been already done to students and schools.
School challenges
SF 496, signed into law by governor Kim Reynolds in May 2023, requires each Iowa school district to establish a K–12 library program that “contains only age-appropriate materials.” The law requires the removal of books from public school libraries if they are found to contain a “description” of a “sex act,” and it allows for disciplinary action against school districts or employees found to have “knowingly violated” its tenets. The law also includes provisions requiring school officials to report to parents if their child requests to use a different name or pronouns—the subject of a related lawsuit filed in November 2023.
Locher’s first injunction against SF 496 in December 2023, hailed as a victory in publishing and library sectors, was vacated by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in August 2024. The Eighth Circuit remanded the case back to Locher, with instructions to test the law according to First Amendment principles addressed in the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Moody v. NetChoice, LLC. Plaintiffs filed a new complaint in September 2024, and Locher re-examined the case.
While writing the initial order, Locher noted that “the Court devoted considerable attention to determining the constitutional rights implicated by the challenges to the book restrictions in Senate File 496 and the governing standard(s) for evaluating the law’s constitutionality.” In his March 25 order, he questioned why “the Eighth Circuit did not address that analysis” except to point the Court to the NetChoice decision. “The Court will of course try to do a better job this time around,” he promised.
Having done so, Locher determined that “under the legal standard applicable to cases involving statewide restrictions on books in bookstores or public libraries, the results of the NetChoice analysis are clear and unequivocal: the book restrictions in Senate File 496 are facially unconstitutional.” He also evaluated whether books might be considered “school-sponsored speech,” looked at what constitutes a “description” of a “sex act,” assessed “uncertainty” around standards for compliance with the law, and addressed the “risk of irreparable harm” to the plaintiffs.
In examining First Amendment rights, Locher observed that “the Supreme Court has never settled on a single, governing standard for First Amendment challenges in school settings,” noting that “there is no one-size-fits-all standard for school-related First Amendment challenges.” SF 496 “does not fall neatly within any of the legal doctrines the Supreme Court and Eighth Circuit have developed in prior First Amendment cases in the school setting,” Locher asserted, citing guidance from two 1982 cases: Island Trees School District v. Pico, a censorship case around removing nine specific books from a school; and Pratt v. Independent School District No. 831, an effort to ban films shown in school due to their ideological content.
Of all the books he studied for their visual and narrative content, he found only one that he thought met legal grounds for removal in Iowa: “Plaintiffs appear to concede that [Maia Kobabe's memoir] Gender Queer may be removed without violating the First Amendment due to graphic pictures of sexual activity. Accordingly, the removal of that book is a constitutional application of Senate File 496.” Overall, however, he determined that “the State Defendants have not identified, nor has the Court been able to locate, a single case upholding school library restrictions as broad as those found in Senate File 496”—a sweeping law that has swept up thousands of copies of books from schools across the state.
