Federal Judge Declares Parts of Florida School Book Ban Law Unconstitutional

ORLANDO, Florida – On August 13, 2025, U.S. District Judge Carlos Mendoza of the Middle District of Florida ruled that portions of Florida’s House Bill 1069 (HB 1069), which amended section 1006.28 of the Florida Statutes to expand parental objections to school library materials, violate the First Amendment.

In the case Penguin Random House LLC et al. v. Gibson et al. (Case No. 6:24-cv-1573-CEM-RMN), Mendoza, appointed by President Obama, granted summary judgment to plaintiffs on multiple counts, striking down the law’s prohibition on materials that “depict or describe sexual conduct” as overbroad. The judge preserved the ban on “pornographic” materials by interpreting the term as synonymous with “harmful to minors” under Florida Statute section 847.012, which incorporates a modified version of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Miller Test for obscenity.

The plaintiffs include book publishers Penguin Random House LLC, Hachette Book Group, Inc., HarperCollins Publishers LLC, Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC, Simon & Schuster, LLC, and Sourcebooks LLC; authors Julia Alvarez, John Green, Laurie Halse Anderson, Jodi Picoult, and Angie Thomas; The Authors Guild; and parents Heidi Kellogg and Judith Anne Hayes, suing on behalf of their minor children.

Defendants are members of the Florida State Board of Education (Ben Gibson, Ryan Petty, Esther Byrd, Grazie P Christie, Kelly Garcia, and Marylynn Magar) and school board officials from Volusia County (Teresa Jacobs, Angie Gallo, Maria Salamanca, Alicia Farrant, Anne Douglas, Vicki-Elaine Felder, Stephanie Vanos, and Melissa Byrd) and Orange County (Jamie Haynes, Krista Goodrich, Ruben Colon, Donna Brosemer, and Jessie Thompson).

HB 1069, enacted in 2023, requires school districts to remove materials within five school days if objected to for containing “pornographic” content, being prohibited under section 847.012, or depicting or describing “sexual conduct” as defined in section 847.001(19). The law mandates discontinuation of such materials district-wide if confirmed to contain prohibited content.

Mendoza’s opinion highlighted removals of specific books, including On the Road by Jack Kerouac, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Looking for Alaska by John Green, Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult, The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez, and Shout by Laurie Halse Anderson. These were pulled not based on librarians’ professional judgment but due to isolated content fragments fitting the law’s criteria.

The court rejected defendants’ arguments that the removals constitute government speech exempt from First Amendment scrutiny, noting the statute mandates removals without holistic evaluation and often at parents’ behest. Applying a non-public forum standard, Mendoza found the “sexual conduct” prohibition unreasonable, as it fails to consider a work’s overall value and sweeps in non-obscene materials.

For the “pornographic” provision, the judge applied the canon of constitutional avoidance, construing it to match the “harmful to minors” standard, which requires assessing if a work predominantly appeals to prurient interest, is patently offensive for minors, and lacks serious value for minors when taken as a whole.

All plaintiffs were found to have standing: parents for their children’s right to receive information, authors and publishers for chilled speech, and The Authors Guild as a representative organization. The court dismissed Eleventh Amendment and prudential standing challenges, as well as claims the complaint was a shotgun pleading.

The ruling followed oral arguments on May 21, 2025. It grants plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment on counts challenging the “sexual conduct” ban (Counts I, IV, VII) and the interpretive counts saving “pornographic” (Counts II, V), while denying relief on alternative counts seeking to strike “pornographic” outright (Counts III, VI).

The decision requires school districts to adhere to the narrower obscenity standard, potentially allowing many removed books to return.