Federal Court Rules Against Intellectual Freedom In Llano County Case

A federal court has delivered a harsh loss in the fight for intellectual freedom, ruling that public libraries can remove books with ideas they don’t like.

In a 10-7 decision, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Llano County, Texas, an hour west of the state capital. The county’s library system has been at the heart of legal scuffles over book banning since officials ordered the removal of 17 books from shelves in 2021.

The titles included Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist and three books in the I Need a New Butt! children’s picture-book series from Dawn McMillan.

Seven library patrons sued the county in federal court, charging that the removals violated their First Amendment rights. Previous court rulings supported those patrons, ordering some books back on shelves as the case made its way through the legal system. 

In March 2023, then-federal Judge Jacques Wiener wrote in a majority opinion from the Fifth Circuit that politics clearly fueled the removals. A book “may not be removed for the sole – or a substantial — reason that the decisionmaker does not wish patrons to be able to access the book’s viewpoint or message,” Wiener wrote. 

The next month, county officials met to discuss closing the libraries outright rather than continue their legal wrangling. They eventually decided to keep them open. 

The dissent in that 2023 decision was from Trump appointee Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan. He wrote the May 9 majority decision that reversed previous rulings.

“If a disappointed patron can’t find a book in the library, he can order it online, buy it from a bookstore, or borrow it from a friend,” Duncan wrote. “All Llano County has done here is what libraries have been doing for two centuries: decide which books they want in their collections.”

His decision – called “disturbingly flippant” by fellow judges who dissented – directly contradicts longtime library policies and established court precedent. 

“This astounding decision reveals either ignorance of the scale and danger of state censorship or deliberate indifference toward it,” Elly Brinkley, PEN America’s staff attorney for U.S. Free Expression Programs, said in a statement.

“The record clearly shows that the government removed books based on politically-motivated viewpoint discrimination – a violation of constitutionally protected rights,” Brinkley said. “The court’s embrace of the dangerous argument that the curation of library books constitutes ‘government speech’ immunizes state censorship from First Amendment scrutiny, essentially giving the government free rein to exert ideological control over what citizens can read in their public libraries.”

The decision must be overturned, she added. 

Katherine Chiarello, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said the team is contemplating next steps. In a statement, she lamented the court’s decision to “regress from its long-standing protection of a citizen’s right to receive information under the First Amendment and that it has attempted to create a circuit split by dramatically expanding the scope of the government speech doctrine.”

Earlier this year, Llano County settled a second related lawsuit over its 2022 firing of a former Kingsland librarian. Suzette Baker said county officials fired after she refused to pull books targeted by conservative activists. Filmmakers featured Baker’s story in the 2025 documentary The Librarians.