A federal judge has ruled that a lawsuit challenging Utah’s school book ban law can proceed, rejecting the state’s attempt to get the case tossed out before authors and publishers even got their day in court. It is, refreshingly, a ruling that treats “the First Amendment might still apply here” as a live legal question rather than an inconvenience.
Utah’s law allows a book to be pulled from every school district statewide if enough local districts flag it, a system that in practice has led to sweeping removals of titles based on complaints that, in more than a few cases, appear to have been filed by people who never finished reading them. The lawsuit, brought in part on behalf of authors whose work has been swept up in the process, argues this amounts to unconstitutional viewpoint-based censorship.
The judge’s decision to let the case continue doesn’t declare the law unconstitutional outright, but it does mean the state will actually have to defend it on the merits, in front of a court, with evidence, rather than getting to make the inconvenient lawsuit disappear on a technicality.
It’s a small, procedural, unglamorous kind of victory. It is also, in the current climate, the kind of victory we’ll gladly take: a judge deciding that due process still applies, even to a Kurt Vonnegut paperback.
Don’t take our word for it: The Salt Lake Tribune has the full story. It’s exactly as described.