Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District No. 26 v. Pico, 457 U.S. 853 (1982), was a case in which the United States Supreme Court split on the First Amendment issue of local school boards removing library books from junior high schools and high schools. Four Justices ruled that it was unconstitutional, four Justices concluded the contrary (with perhaps a few minor exceptions), and one Justice concluded that the court need not decide the question on the merits. Pico was the first Supreme Court case to consider the right to receive information in a library setting under the First Amendment, but the court's fractured plurality decision left the scope of this right unclear.
Facts
Background
In September 1975, the Island Trees Board of Education received a list of books deemed inappropriate by Parents of New York United. The board temporarily removed the books from school libraries and formed a committee to review the list. The committee found that five of the nine books should be returned, but the board overruled the decision and returned only two of the books.
A group of five high school students (including one junior high school student) who, according to oral argument, were 17, 16, 15, 14, and 13 years old at the time of the removal of the books, led by Steven Pico, filed a lawsuit against the school board by claiming a violation of First Amendment rights. The United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York granted summary judgment in favor of the school board, citing the discretion given to a school board's authority in terms of its political philosophy. The judgment was challenged and remanded to the Second Circuit after questions rose of the school board's motives.
Case
According to the syllabus of the case:
Eleven books were the subject of the case. The books were:
Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. The Naked Ape, by Desmond Morris Down These Mean Streets, by Piri Thomas Best Short Stories of Negro Writers, edited by Langston Hughes Go Ask Alice, of anonymous authorship Laughing Boy, by Oliver LaFarge Black Boy, by Richard Wright A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich, by Alice Childress Soul on Ice, by Eldridge Cleaver A Reader for Writers, edited by Jerome Archer The Fixer, by Bernard Malamud
The first nine titles above were removed from shelves of the High School library; A Reader for Writers was removed from the Junior High School library because it contained the 1729 satirical essay A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift which the Board found to be offensive; and The Fixer was removed from the curriculum of a 12th-grade literature course.
Plurality
No single opinion commanded a majority of the Court or announced any legal binding rule. Justice Brennan announced the judgment of the Court affirming the Court of Appeals and delivered an opinion joined by Justices Marshall and Stevens and joined in all but Part II-A(1) by Justice Blackmun. Justice Blackmun filed an opinion concurring in part and concurring the judgment.
Justice Brennan noted the Court had previously held that students do not "shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate" (Tinker v. Des Moines School District). Brennan also reasoned that the First Amendment protects not only the right to express ideas but also the right to receive them. The First Amendment, in this case, included the right to read library books of the student's choosing.
Brennan concluded the plurality opinion by noting that the court's holding was narrowly limited to the extent of the school board's authority to remove books from the school library:
Justice Blackmun's concurrence
Justice Blackmun, concurring, concluded that a proper balance between the limited constitutional restriction imposed on school officials by the First Amendment and the broad state authority to regulate education would be struck by holding that school officials may not remove books from school libraries for the purpose of restricting access to the political perspectives or social ideas discussed in the books when that action is motivated simply by the officials' disapproval of the ideas involved.
Justice White's concurrence
Justice White provided the necessary fifth vote for the outcome, which was to allow the case to proceed in the lower court. However, his reasoning was different from that of the plurality and of Justice Blackmun, and he expressly refused to opine on the First Amendment question.