Each year, Banned Books Week shines a spotlight on the importance of free and open access to information. While the event often highlights novels, memoirs, and children’s books that have faced challenges in schools and public libraries, it’s also an opportunity to reflect on the legal battles that shape how the First Amendment is interpreted. This year, Banned Book Week is celebrated October 5-11!
For law students and scholars, this week provides a chance to revisit the landmark decisions and scholarship that continue to influence debates around speech and access to information in the United States. From treatises to monographs, the Law Library catalog offers scholarly resources that explore how courts have addressed the tension between protecting free speech and regulating harmful or offensive content.
Selected Titles from Our Collection
You Can’t Always Say What You Want: The Paradox of Free Speech, by Dennis Baron
The freedom to think what you want and to say what you think has always generated a pushback of regulation and censorship. This raises the thorny question: to what extent does free speech actually endanger speech protection? This book examines today’s calls for speech legislation and places it into historical perspective, using fascinating examples from the past 200 years, to explain the historical context of laws regulating speech.
Stacks – Basement ; K3254 .B375 2023
Not in Front of the Children: “Indecency,” Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth, by Marjorie Heins
From Huckleberry Finn to Harry Potter, Internet filters to the V-chip, censorship is often based on the assumption that children and adolescents must be protected from “indecent” information that might harm their development — whether in art, in literature, or on a Web site. But where does this assumption come from, and is it true? In Not in Front of the Children, a pathbreaking history of “indecency” laws and other restrictions aimed at protecting youth, Marjorie Heins suggests that the “harm-to-minors” argument rests on shaky foundations.
Stacks – Basement ; Z658.U5 H42 2001
Banned: The Fight for Mexican American Studies in the Streets and in the Courts, by Robert S. Chang and Nolan L. Cabrera
In Banned, readers are taken on a journey through the intense racial politics surrounding the banning of Mexican American Studies in Tucson, Arizona. This book details the state-sponsored racism that led to the elimination of this highly successful program, and the grassroots and legal resistance that followed. Through extensive research and firsthand narratives, readers will gain a deep understanding of the controversy surrounding this historic case. The legal challenge successfully overturned the Arizona law and became a central symbol in the modern-day Ethnic Studies renaissance.
Stacks – Basement ; KF4155 .C33 2025
What Johnny Shouldn’t Read: Textbook Censorship in America, by Joan DelFattore
Joan Delfattore offers a behind-the-scenes view of the ways in which special-interest groups influence the content of textbooks used in public and private schools throughout the country. Efforts to censor elementary and high school textbooks have proliferated in the past decade. Most challenges have come from ultraconservative activists who oppose evolution, racial and ethnic equality, nontraditional gender roles, pacifism, and a host of other issues that contradict their religious, political, or social views. Other protests originate with ultraliberal activists whose goal is to eliminate all negative or traditional descriptions of racial, ethnic, religious, or gender groups, without regard for accuracy or historical context. DelFattore focuses on recent federal lawsuits involving attempts to censor or ban biology, geology, history, home economics, literature, psychology, reading, and social studies textbooks.
Stacks – Basement ; KF4775 .D45 1992
Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate, by Greg Lukianoff
For over a generation, shocking cases of censorship at America’s colleges and universities have taught students the wrong lessons about living in a free society. Drawing on a decade of experience battling for freedom of speech on campus, First Amendment lawyer Greg Lukianoff reveals how higher education fails to teach students to become critical thinkers: by stifling open debate, our campuses are supercharging ideological divisions, promoting groupthink, and encouraging an unscholarly certainty about complex issues.
Stacks – Basement ; KF4242 .L85 2014
The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder, by Robert Corn-Revere
Beginning in the nineteenth century with Anthony Comstock, America’s ‘censor in chief,’ The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder explores how censors operate and why they wore out their welcome in society at large. This book explains how the same tactics were tried and eventually failed in the twentieth century, with efforts to censor music, comic books, television, and other forms of popular entertainment. The historic examples illustrate not just the mindset and tactics of censors, but why they are the ultimate counterculture warriors and why, in free societies, censors never occupy the moral high ground.
Stacks – Basement ; KF4770 .C67 2021
Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century, by Rebecca Knuth
This book identifies the regime-sponsored, ideologically driven, and systemic destruction of books and libraries in the 20th century that often served as a prelude or accompaniment to the massive human tragedies that have characterized a most violent century. Using case studies of libricide committed by Nazis, Serbs in Bosnia, Iraqis in Kuwait, Maoists during the Cultural Revolution in China, and Chinese Communists in Tibet, Knuth argues that the destruction of books and libraries by authoritarian regimes was sparked by the same impulses toward negation that provoked acts of genocide or ethnocide.
Stacks – Basement ; Z659 .K58 2003
The Disappearing First Amendment, by Ronald J Krotoszynski Jr.
The standard account of the First Amendment presupposes that the Supreme Court has consistently expanded the scope of free speech rights over time. This account holds true in some areas, but not in others. In this illuminating work, Ronald J. Krotoszynski, Jr acknowledges that the contemporary Supreme Court rigorously enforces the rules against content and viewpoint discrimination for those who possess the wherewithal to speak but when citizens need the government’s assistance to speak – for example, access to public property for protest – free speech rights have declined. Instead of using open-ended balancing tests, the Roberts and Rehnquist Courts have opted for bright line, categorical rules that minimize judicial discretion. Opportunities for democratic engagement could be enhanced, however, if the federal courts returned to the Warren Court’s balancing approach and vested federal judges with discretionary authority to require government to assist would-be speakers.
Stacks – Basement ; KF4770 .K735 2019
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Note: Book descriptions are those provided by the publisher.
Banned Books Week reminds us that these issues are far from settled, and that the legal community continues to play a central role in defining the boundaries of free expression. Stop by the Law Library to check out these books (which are only representative of the Library’s collection on First Amendment law). Alternatively, take some time to read one of the notable court cases related to the freedom to read, like Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District No. 26 v. Pico, 457 U.S. 853 (1982) or Sund v. City of Wichita Falls, Texas, 121 F. Supp. 2d 530 (N.D. Texas, 2000) — just a few good options.
Regardless of how you “celebrate” Banned Book Week, the Law Library hopes you take a few moments to reflect on your right to read and access information — and how we can all work together to protect that vital component of our democratic society.