Trump-appointed judge rips Texas law setting up book-ban regime for state's schools (UPDATE: it's going into effect. see blurb)
“This is textbook compelled speech,” U.S. District Judge Alan Albright ruled in halting enforcement of the law. Texas is appealing.
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OP NOTE: This is actually a week old, today 3 judge panel allowed the ban to go into effect. Here's the author's mastodon post about it. though there are few other details
BREAKING: A three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit (Elrod, Haynes, Douglas) allows Texas’s book-ban law to go into effect, issuing an administrative stay of the district court ruling enjoining enforcement of the law.
The court gave no reasoning for its order, which is remarkable given that the law has never been allowed to go into effect, so the order — although posed as merely “administrative” — is a ruling, at least temporarily, changing the status of state law.
... rest of blurb ...
On Monday, a federal judge ruled in favor of booksellers who argued that Texas’s new law banning some books from public school libraries and restricting others through an onerous and complicated regime is likely unconstitutional in an opinion that blasted the law and the arguments the state made in its defense.
“[T]his Court has found that READER likely violates the First Amendment by containing an unconstitutional prior restraint, compelled speech, and unconstitutional vagueness,” U.S. District Judge Alan Albright — a Trump appointee to the federal bench — concluded in issuing a preliminary injunction halting state officials from enforcing the law. Texas already announced that it is appealing the decision.
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“To put the scale of the number of books that would need to be rated in perspective, a librarian in San Antonio for Northside ISD testified that six school districts alone had library collections totaling over six million items,“ Albright wrote. There are more than 1,200 school districts in Texas.
Let’s just get this out of the way: Albright cannot believe this law exists. He also cannot believe the arguments the state made in its defense.
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