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Florida’s HB 1069 aims to ban from public-school libraries any book describing or depicting sexual conduct by requiring local school districts to remove within five days any book identified by a parent or resident as containing such content. A group of book publishers, authors, and parents filled a facial challenge and successfully obtained summary judgment preventing enforcement of the law, which the district court correctly held violates the First Amendment.

Florida defended the ban by arguing library book selection and removal are forms of government speech, the message being, “These books are appropriate literary material for the K-12 audience, and they have legitimate pedagogical value.”  Acceptance of this theory—which the Eight Circuit rejected in GLBT Youth in Iowa Schs. Task Force v. Reynolds, 114 F.4th 660 (8th Cir. 2024), but some Fifth Circuit judges accepted in Little v. Llano County, 138 F.4th 834, 859 (5th Cir. 2025)—would mean government officials could control the collections of all public libraries based on any criteria or any viewpoint. The district court in this case correctly rejected Florida’s government speech theory.

FIRE filed an amicus brief, joined by the Florida Freedom to Read Project, urging the Eleventh Circuit to follow the Eighth Circuit in rejecting the libraries-as-government speech claim. FIREargues Florida’s law ignores centuries of hard-won lessons about the value of free expression and the dangers of government censorship. We explain that public-school libraries are not instruments of government speech, but unique institutions that serve as repositories of knowledge and forums for intellectual exploration. While states have an interest in ensuring public-school library materials are age-appropriate, HB1069’s across-the-board ban on a broad category of content does not serve that interest. It requires schools to apply the same standards to high school seniors and elementary schoolers. Such top-down, politically motivated control over library collections violates students’ First Amendment right to access information.