Board of Education v. Pico and First Amendment access to information

Violation of First Amendment rights, notably of a particular corollary referring to freedom of information, of access to information and of the right to freely receive information.

FACTS

The school board decided on the removal of nine books from the school library. These books, including titles such as Slaughterhouse Five or the Naked Ape, but also Best Short Stories of Negro Writers, were deemed to contain unsuitable and unorthodox ideas. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a trial in which to analyze the constitutionality of the motives that led to the respective decision. With a vote of 5 to 4, the Supreme Court reaffirmed the order, however, the Justices did not agree on the constitutional basis for the decision.

REASONING

The court interpreted the First Amendment breech in a larger sense, that of the need for the Constitution and the state to protect the right to receive information and ideas. This was conceived, in their opinion, as a corollary to the rights of free speech and free press. In this sense, by removing the respective books from their school library, the school board denoted, in their opinion, an attempt to limit the students' access to certain ideas presented in those books.

On the other hand, a motive of debate was whether or not the Court should be intervening on issues that, ultimately, belong to daily operations in schools. The Court judged, however, that this was a breech to "basic constitutional values" (as in Epperson vs. Arkansas) and, in this sense, the judicial system's intervention becomes a necessity.

Additionally, the Court decided that the school board's decision could not be justified by the sole means of "educational suitability," which would have made it permissible, but that it was based on a purely partisan, political approach (some of the 9 titles clearly suggest this).

Petitioners rightly possess significant discretion to determine the content of school libraries. But that discretion may not be exercised in a narrowly partisan or political manner."

ANALYSIS

In Board of Education vs. Pico, the Supreme Court affirmed, with a 5-4 vote an order from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals of a trial to determine whether the school board was acting from unconstitutional motives in removing nine books from the school library. Although their constitutional basis was undecided, their argumentation tended to show that the removal of certain books, when done in a partisan manner, was a breech of the First Amendment corollary of access to information.

The school board's action was narrowly judged to be unconstitutional, following this argumentation.