Access Denied: How Internet Filters Impact Student Learning in H ...

While early challenges to free speech in libraries typically involved removing individual books from the shelf, use of the Internet in libraries has raised entirely new questions. The best introduction to modern technology-based legal challenges to intellectual freedom in libraries is Robert Peck’s Libraries, the First Amendment and Cyberspace: What You Need to Know (2000). He clearly distinguishes the legal definitions of “obscenity” and “pornography,” delineates the rights of children separately from adults, and clarifies the doctrine of a public forum, which is a critical concept in the legal history of intellectual freedom in libraries. He provides a context for the most important court cases in the field: Miller v. California (1973) set the criteria currently in effect for the definition of obscenity. In Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District No. 26 v. Pico (1982), the Supreme Court ruled that school boards may not remove books from school library shelves for political or partisan purposes. The Communications Decency Act was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union (1997). In Kathleen R v. City of Livermore (1999), a mother sued unsuccessfully to force her public library to filter its computers so her son could not access pornography. In Mainstream Loudon v. Board of Trustees (1998), a group of residents successfully sued the library to strike down its policy of installing filters on all computers. This ruling established Internet use in libraries as a “limited public forum,” and therefore subject to strict scrutiny, an important legal concept. However, the public forum argument was rejected in the landmark CIPA case, U.S. v. American Library Association (2003) where Justice Rehnquist’s opinion clearly stated that “Internet access in public libraries is neither a ‘traditional’ nor a ‘designated’ public forum” (p. 8).