Legal News

A Book Ban in Miami Gets . . . Upheld

By Ashby Jones

Let’s move away from L’Affaire Madoff and the situation with Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg this morning, and journey down to Atlanta, where the 11th Circuit made a provocative ruling on Thursday involving children’s books and Cuba.

According to this account in the Miami Herald, the 11th Circuit ruled Thursday that the Miami-Dade School Board did not violate the Constitution in 2006 when it removed a controversial children’s book about Cuba from the public schools’ library system.

In a 2-1 decision, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta said the board did not breach the First Amendment, and ordered a Miami federal judge to lift a preliminary injunction that had allowed the book, called Vamos a Cuba to be checked out from school libraries.

Granted, we’re not First Amendment scholars, but we can’t recall an incident in which a court, let alone a federal appellate court, upheld a decision to remove a book from a school’s library.

But it appears the court rested its ruling on the fact that the school board removed the book because it contained “factual inaccuracies,” not over anything having to do with the book’s content.

In 2006, board members voted 6-3 to remove the book — which had been available in some school libraries as extracurricular reading for children in kindergarten through the second grade — a parent and former political prisoner in Cuba, complained that the book failed to accurately depict life there.

Members of the school board cheered the ruling. But the ACLU was none too pleased.

”Clearly, this can’t be allowed to stand. We must take further action,” said Howard Simon, executive director of the ACLU of Florida. ”However much they try to evade the facts and bend the law into a pretzel, censorship is censorship is censorship,” Simon said.

Editor’s Note: Dan Slater has the day off. He will return Monday.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 06, 2009 (boomark / email).