Book Removal Is ‘Government Speech,’ Florida Tells 11th Circuit

April 22, 2026, 4:46 PM UTC

Libraries filled with just Republican or male authors, only anti-oil literature, or just pamphlets backing a candidate would all be legal ways to govern public school library shelves, Florida told the Eleventh Circuit Wednesday.

Those hypotheticals were posed by US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit Judges Elizabeth L. Branch and Britt C. Grant as ways of testing the limits of Florida’s argument that government speech rights allows the state to create policy choices over public school materials.

The state acknowledged that includes the potential removal of award-winning books for even a single sentence depicting sex—something publishers have said ...

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