Industry & Advocacy News

Authors Guild Victory: Plaintiffs Prevail as Judge Rules READER Act Violated First Amendment

Book Banning Free Speech

October 24, 2025

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Update, October 25, 2025: On October 23, 2025, Texas filed its notice of appeal to the Fifth Circuit.

October 23, 2025: The Authors Guild, together with booksellers, publishers, and fellow advocacy organizations, has secured a decisive victory on summary judgement against Texas’s controversial book rating mandate. On October 21, 2025, U.S. District Judge Alan D. Albright ruled on summary judgment motions filed by the parties after discovery in the case, finding the Restricting Explicit and Adult-Designated Educational Resources (READER) Act unconstitutional and permanently enjoining key provisions of the law. He ruled that the law unconstitutionally compelled speech, imposed impermissibly vague standards, and functioned as an unconstitutional prior restraint on protected expression.  

“The government tried to force booksellers and publishers to become agents of state censorship, rating books according to unconstitutionally vague standards and then forcing them to adopt the state’s own ratings as their speech,” said Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild. “The law would have taken many books off shelves, with no meaningful appeal and no consideration of a work’s educational value. The court recognized what we’ve argued all along: while there are constitutional ways to give parents input into their children’s education, READER’s forced ratings, government overrides, and prior censorship weren’t one of them.”  

We congratulate our fellow plaintiffs Book People, Inc., Blue Willow Bookshop, the American Booksellers Association, the Association of American Publishers, and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund for their incredible work. This diverse coalition represented the interests of authors, booksellers, publishers, and readers united against government-compelled speech that would have chilled access to constitutionally protected books in Texas schools.  

The suit was first filed on July 25, 2023, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, Austin Division. Judge Albright granted a preliminary injunction barring implementation of the law on September 18, 2023. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed the preliminary injunction on January 17, 2025, noting that “Plaintiffs have an interest in selling books without being coerced to speak the State’s preferred message” and agreeing that plaintiffs were likely to succeed on their First Amendment claims and would “likely sustain economic and constitutional injuries” if the law remained in effect. This week’s ruling makes that injunction permanent. 

Given the state’s scorched earth litigation tactics and refusal to acknowledge the clear unconstitutionality of the law, it may well try to appeal this decision as well—but will almost certainly fail again.  

How READER Would Have Worked—And Why It Failed 

Passed by the Texas Legislature in 2023, READER aimed to regulate sexually explicit content in public school libraries by creating an elaborate rating system. The law would have required book vendors selling to Texas schools to: 

• Rate every book they’ve ever sold to schools as “sexually explicit,” “sexually relevant,” or “no rating” 

• Submit these ratings to the Texas Education Agency (TEA) for review 

• Accept the TEA’s re-ratings as their own, with no meaningful appeal process 

• Issue recalls for all “sexually explicit” materials previously sold to schools 

• Face a complete ban on selling any books to any Texas school if they failed to comply 

Judge Albright found that this system crossed multiple constitutional lines. Most significantly, the law compelled vendors to make “controversial statements against their will” and forced them to “adopt the TEA’s ratings as their own, in violation of their sincerely held beliefs.” The Supreme Court’s recent decision in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis made clear that “the First Amendment protects against the government compelling a person to speak its own preferred messages,” the court noted. 

The Vagueness Problem 

Judge Albright found READER unconstitutionally vague, with key terms lacking workable definitions. Vendors would face a “sixteen-step process” to rate each book, requiring them to determine whether content was “so offensive on its face as to affront current community standards of decency”—without guidance on which community’s standards applied. Even Texas Education Agency representatives couldn’t clearly explain how vendors should interpret these requirements. Critically, READER’s definition of “sexually explicit” omitted the established constitutional safeguard requiring that obscene works lack “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” As Judge Albright wrote: “READER encourages arbitrary and discriminatory applications by failing to follow the accepted obscenity test. Moreover, READER’s failure to account for a work’s literary, artistic, political, or scientific value encourages ad hoc judgments which can vary from bookseller to bookseller.” 

An Unconstitutional Prior Restraint 

The court also found READER functioned as an unconstitutional prior restraint—a system of censorship that prevents speech before it occurs without proper procedural safeguards. Prior restraints must place the burden on the government to prove material is unprotected, allow only brief restraints to preserve the status quo, and ensure prompt judicial review. In other words, if the government wants to stop speech before it happens, it must quickly prove in court why that specific speech isn’t constitutionally protected—not simply ban it indefinitely and force speakers to fight to get it back. READER failed all three tests: It placed the burden on vendors, gave the TEA unilateral authority to rate books and impose prohibitions indefinitely, and provided “no avenue for independent review by a third party or prompt judicial determination that such books can be lawfully banned.” The court concluded that READER prevented “the distribution of books possibly protected by the First Amendment” without the constitutional safeguards required to justify such censorship. 

Texas’s Failed Defense 

Throughout the litigation, Texas attempted to characterize READER as merely the state exercising its prerogative as a consumer choosing which books to purchase with taxpayer funds. Judge Albright firmly rejected this argument:  

“READER is compelling speech and is a bookselling regulation. READER does not just set forth preferences for selectively funding book purchases. READER requires Plaintiffs to rate books and accept the TEA’s re-ratings…READER imposes unconstitutional conditions on a party’s ability to contract with the government, because it requires Plaintiffs to surrender their First Amendment rights to do any business with public schools.” 

While acknowledging the state’s legitimate interest in protecting children from obscene content, the court emphasized that “those powers should be exercised by the state directly—not by compelling third parties to perform it or risk losing any opportunity to engage in commerce with school districts.” 

The Broader Context: Escalating Censorship 

According to the American Library Association, book challenges have reached record levels in recent years, with organized efforts increasingly targeting books by and about LGBTQIA+ individuals and people of color. Legislative attempts to restrict access to books—like READER—have proliferated across multiple states, while censorship threats have spread to the federal level—where agencies have been instructed to avoid certain words—and funding threats based on content have created chilling effects on expression.  

Against this backdrop, the permanent injunction against the READER Act sends an important message: Attempts to conscript private parties into government censorship schemes will not withstand constitutional scrutiny. The ruling affirms that the First Amendment protects not just the right to speak freely, but also the right not to be forced to convey the government’s preferred messages through vague and viewpoint-discriminatory standards.