Protecting Students' "Right to Listen" by Statute

Over the past several years, the United States has seen a significant increase in politically motivated efforts to remove materials from public school libraries. Activists, academics, and litigants have decried these so-called "book bans" as violating students' First Amendment right to receive information. In this essay, I question that argument. I note that there is generally no freestanding First Amendment right to listen, and that the seminal case identifying students' First Amendment right to receive information from their public school libraries, Island Trees School District v. Pico, was decided prior to the development of the government speech doctrine. Therefore, although book bans are bad policy, they may be constitutional. Accordingly, I argue in favor of the growing movement to ban book bans by statute, and provide model language that could be adopted by jurisdictions seeking to do so.