Garden District Book Shop v. Caldwell – Challenge to Louisiana Online Censorship Law

The Louisiana law, H.B. 153, requires that “[a]ny person or entity in Louisiana that publishes material harmful to minors on the Internet shall, prior to permitting access to the material, require any person attempting to access the material to electronically acknowledge and attest that the person seeking to access the material is eighteen years of age or older.” The failure to do so is a crime punishable by a $10,000 fine.

Under the law, a broad range of material that has serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value for some 16- and 17-year olds would be placed behind an age verification screen simply because some might consider it harmful to any minor. This could include materials about sexuality and reproductive health, which older minors have a constitutional right to access. Some Louisiana websites — for example, Louisiana booksellers who use online book databases with an inventory of millions of books — may respond to the law by simply placing an age verification screen on the front of their entire website, because it would be too burdensome to evaluate every single image or text on their site. That could result, for example, in the inability of a 17-year-old to buy a copy of Little House on the Prairie from a Louisiana bookstore’s website for herself or a younger sibling.

Our clients include booksellers, magazines, and members of the American Booksellers Association and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. They all offer, display, and sell a broad range of material protected by the First Amendment, including artistic, historical, and newsworthy materials.

While the intent of the law is to protect minors from seeing material that is harmful to them, it is a futile attempt, because the vast majority of material on the Internet is published outside Louisiana and accessible to any Louisiana minor. The law will have virtually no effect on Louisiana minors’ ability to access “harmful” content, and other, less restrictive alternatives exist that could accomplish the same goals.