In June 2025, Secular AZ sponsored a seminar on banned books at the Arizona State Bar Convention. One of our main speakers was Lynn Oberlander from Ballard, Spahr in NY. She is also the lead attorney on the case of Penguin Random House et al v. Ben Gibson et al in Florida that was decided on August 13, 2025.
The 50-page opinion was on summary judgment (a.k.a. I win without a trial because there are no factual issues only legal ones) in which the court granted the plaintiff’s motion and granted in part and denied in part the motions by both the State and the School Boards.
For background, the court outlined the stories of several high schoolers who went to the library to check out books that had disappeared. Such books as 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 were gone.
These very same books are the ones targeted in Scottsdale and other schools in Arizona by “outside agitators” who are creating these lists for local groups to use to attack local libraries. This is not a homegrown action.
