Island Trees School District v. Pico

Based on Wikipedia: Island Trees School District v. Pico

The Students Who Sued Over Banned Books

In 1976, five teenagers from Long Island did something remarkable. They sued their school board.

The youngest was thirteen. The oldest was seventeen. Their leader was a high school student named Steven Pico. Their crime, in the eyes of the school board? They wanted to read books that adults had decided were too dangerous for them.

The case they launched would eventually reach the highest court in the land, forcing the nine justices of the United States Supreme Court to grapple with a deceptively simple question: Can a school board remove books from a library simply because it doesn't like what those books say?

The answer the Court gave was... complicated. In fact, it was so complicated that nearly half a century later, we're still arguing about what it actually means.

How It Started: A List From Concerned Parents

The trouble began in September 1975, when members of the Island Trees Board of Education attended a conference organized by a group called Parents of New York United. At this conference, someone handed them a list. The list contained titles of books that the organization considered inappropriate for school libraries—books they believed were, in their words, "anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy."

The board members returned home and discovered that their school libraries contained nine of the listed books. They also found two additional books they found objectionable. Without any formal review process, without consulting librarians or teachers, without any public discussion, they ordered all eleven books removed from the shelves.

What were these supposedly dangerous texts? The list included some of the most celebrated American literature of the twentieth century.

Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five was there—a novel about the firebombing of Dresden, written by a man who survived it. Richard Wright's Black Boy, his searing memoir of growing up Black in the Jim Crow South, made the list. So did The Fixer by Bernard Malamud, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

The board also banned Best Short Stories of Negro Writers, an anthology edited by the legendary poet Langston Hughes. They removed Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver, Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas, and A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich by Alice Childress—books that gave voice to Black and Latino experiences in America.

Go Ask Alice, a controversial diary about teenage drug addiction, was pulled. So was Laughing Boy by Oliver LaFarge, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about Navajo life. Even The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris, a popular science book about human evolution, was deemed unfit for students.

Perhaps the most telling removal was A Reader for Writers, an anthology used in junior high school. The board's objection? It contained Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal"—a satirical essay from 1729 in which Swift sarcastically suggested that the Irish poor could solve their problems by selling their children as food to wealthy English landlords. The essay is considered one of the greatest works of satire in the English language. The board apparently didn't get the joke.

The Review Committee That Got Ignored

When news of the removals became public, the community reacted with outrage. Facing criticism, the board did what institutions often do when caught making controversial decisions: they formed a committee.

The committee included parents and school staff members. They were tasked with reviewing the banned books and making recommendations. After careful consideration, the committee concluded that five of the nine books should be returned to the shelves.

The board ignored them.

Instead of following their own committee's recommendations, the board voted to return only two books. The rest would stay banned. The message was clear: the review process had been theater. The decision had already been made.

Five Kids Against the School Board

This is where Steven Pico and his fellow students enter the story. They believed the board had violated their constitutional rights—specifically, their First Amendment rights. The First Amendment, of course, protects freedom of speech and freedom of the press. But does it also protect the freedom to read?

The students argued that it did. They filed a lawsuit under a federal civil rights law, seeking a court order that would force the school board to return the books to the library shelves.

The federal district court disagreed with them. The judge granted summary judgment to the school board, which means he ruled in the board's favor without even holding a trial. School boards, the judge reasoned, have broad discretion over educational matters. If they want to remove books, that's their prerogative.

The students appealed. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the lower court's decision, finding that there were genuine questions about whether the board's motives were constitutional. The case would need to go to trial.

The school board then appealed to the Supreme Court. And in 1982, the Court agreed to hear the case.

What the Constitution Says (And Doesn't Say)

To understand why this case was so difficult, you need to understand what the First Amendment actually protects—and where it gets murky.

The text itself is straightforward: "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." Over the centuries, the Supreme Court has interpreted this to mean that the government generally cannot punish people for expressing ideas, even unpopular ones.

But what about the right to receive information? The First Amendment doesn't explicitly mention it. Yet several Supreme Court decisions had recognized that the freedom to speak implies a freedom to listen, and the freedom to publish implies a freedom to read. After all, what good is the right to express ideas if no one has the right to hear them?

The Court had also previously established that students don't "shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate"—a famous line from a 1969 case called Tinker v. Des Moines, which involved students suspended for wearing black armbands to protest the Vietnam War.

But schools are also special environments. They're not public forums where anything goes. School officials have legitimate authority to make decisions about curriculum, discipline, and yes, library collections. The question was: where's the line?

A Court Divided Against Itself

When the Supreme Court issued its decision in June 1982, it became clear that the justices themselves couldn't agree on where that line should be drawn.

The Court split four to four on the fundamental constitutional question, with one justice refusing to answer it at all. No opinion commanded a majority. No binding precedent was established. The result was a legal muddle that courts and school boards have been navigating ever since.

Justice William Brennan wrote the plurality opinion—meaning the opinion that got the most votes, even though it didn't get a majority. He was joined by Justices Thurgood Marshall and John Paul Stevens, with Justice Harry Blackmun joining most of the opinion.

Brennan's argument was elegant. The First Amendment, he wrote, protects not just the right to speak but the right to receive information and ideas. A school library is a special place—a place specifically designed to make information available to students. When a school board removes books from that library simply because it disagrees with the ideas in those books, it crosses a constitutional line.

Brennan was careful to limit his ruling. School boards, he emphasized, still have complete discretion over which books to add to their libraries. They can choose not to buy a book for any reason at all. But once a book is on the shelf, removing it because you don't like its ideas is different. That's suppression.

Local school boards may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek by their removal to "prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion."

Justice Blackmun wrote a separate concurrence, agreeing with the result but taking a slightly different approach. For Blackmun, the key question was whether school officials removed books specifically to restrict access to political viewpoints or social ideas they disapproved of. If that was their motivation, it was unconstitutional. If they removed books for other reasons—because the books were educationally unsuitable or vulgar, for example—that might be acceptable.

The Fifth Vote That Wasn't

Justice Byron White provided the crucial fifth vote to let the case proceed—but he explicitly refused to weigh in on the constitutional question.

White's position was essentially: why are we even talking about this? The case hadn't gone to trial yet. No facts had been established. Let the lower court hold a trial, figure out why the board actually removed the books, and then we can decide if there's a constitutional violation.

His concurrence was almost scolding: "When findings of fact and conclusions of law are made by the District Court, that may end the case. If, for example, the District Court concludes after a trial that the books were removed for their vulgarity, there may be no appeal."

White's refusal to join Brennan's constitutional analysis meant that Brennan's opinion, while announcing the judgment of the Court, didn't actually establish binding law. It was guidance, not precedent.

The Dissenters Strike Back

Four justices dissented, and they did not hold back.

Chief Justice Warren Burger led the charge. He rejected the entire premise that students have a constitutional right to receive information in school libraries. "No such right has ever been recognized," he wrote.

Burger saw the plurality's approach as dangerously close to making the Supreme Court into a "super censor" of school board decisions. Schools exist to inculcate values, he argued. That necessarily requires making content-based decisions about what to include and exclude. Elected school boards should make those decisions, not federal judges. If parents disagree with a school board's choices, they can vote the board members out of office.

He also attacked what he saw as an illogical distinction between adding books and removing them. If a school board can choose not to acquire a book in the first place, why can't it remove a book it has already acquired? "It does not follow that the decision to remove a book is less 'official suppression' than the decision not to acquire a book desired by someone."

I categorically reject this notion that the Constitution dictates that judges, rather than parents, teachers, and local school boards, must determine how the standards of morality and vulgarity are to be treated in the classroom.

Justice Lewis Powell emphasized federalism—the principle that states and local governments should handle local matters. School boards, he wrote, are "uniquely local and democratic institutions." The federal courts should defer to their educational judgments, not second-guess them.

Justice William Rehnquist took a different tack. He distinguished between the government acting as "sovereign"—wielding power over citizens—and the government acting as "educator." When the government runs schools, Rehnquist argued, it's engaged in the necessarily selective process of educating young people. Not every book can be purchased. Not every subject can be taught. School officials must constantly make choices about what to include and exclude. That's not censorship; it's education.

Rehnquist also questioned whether a "right to receive information" made any sense in the context of K-12 schools. Education, by definition, involves selecting what information to present and how to present it. If students have a constitutional right to receive whatever information they want, how can schools function at all?

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's dissent was the shortest. She argued that if school boards can set curriculum, hire teachers, and decide which books to purchase, surely they can also decide which books to remove. The key limit, in her view, was that students must remain free to read the removed books on their own time and discuss them freely. Removing a book from a school library doesn't prevent anyone from reading it elsewhere.

What Happened Next

Technically, the students won. The Supreme Court sent the case back for trial, and the school board eventually settled. The books were returned to the shelves.

But because no majority opinion emerged, the case left more questions than answers. Lower courts have struggled to apply its principles consistently. School boards continue to remove books from libraries, and litigation continues to follow.

The fundamental tension the case exposed has never been resolved. On one side stands the principle that the government cannot suppress ideas simply because it disagrees with them. On the other side stands the principle that communities, through their elected representatives, should control what happens in their schools.

Why This Still Matters

In the decades since Island Trees v. Pico, book challenges in schools have ebbed and flowed. In recent years, they have surged dramatically. Books dealing with race, gender identity, sexuality, and American history have become particular targets. School boards across the country have removed books from libraries, sometimes by the hundreds.

The questions the Supreme Court grappled with in 1982 are the same questions being debated today. Does removing a book from a school library violate students' constitutional rights? Does it matter why the book was removed? Who gets to decide what ideas young people can access?

The five teenagers who sued their school board nearly fifty years ago couldn't have known they were launching a case that would still be cited, still be argued about, still be relevant. Steven Pico was just a kid who wanted to read the books that adults told him he couldn't.

In a way, that's what makes the case so compelling. It wasn't a case brought by lawyers or advocacy groups or political organizations. It was brought by students—the very people whose intellectual freedom was at stake.

A Footnote on Art Imitating Life

The story of Island Trees v. Pico proved so dramatic that it inspired not one but two stage musicals. The Line premiered in 1985, just three years after the Supreme Court decision. Breaking Out in Harmony followed in 1994.

There's something fitting about this. The case was, after all, about stories—about which stories young people should be allowed to read, and who gets to make that decision. That the case itself became a story worth telling, worth staging, worth singing about, suggests that the students who fought it understood something important.

Stories matter. Ideas matter. And the freedom to encounter them, even uncomfortable ones, especially uncomfortable ones, might matter most of all.