Island Trees School District v. Pico (1982)
The Island Trees school board in New York removed books including Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and an anthology of Black writers, calling them 'anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy.' Students sued.
A divided Supreme Court ruled that school boards cannot remove library books to suppress ideas, and sent the case back to trial. The books eventually returned to the shelves.
Pico established that students have a First Amendment right to receive information. Schools may remove books for educational reasons but not for ideological disagreement.
HB 29 removes books based on content regardless of literary value, the same kind of removal Pico said courts must scrutinize. Legal challenges to Utah's law will likely lean on this precedent.
