Three years ago, state Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Jonesboro) sponsored Act 372 of 2023--the Library Law--which:

1. Prohibits furnishing items to minors that are unsuitable for them.

2. Removes librarians' and teachers' odd exemption from obscenity law.

3. Clarifies that the prohibition on the distribution of obscenity includes libraries.

4. Requires public schools to adopt policies for book selection, relocation, and retention, and clearly places the ultimate authority over those decisions in the hands of elected officials.

5. Mandates of public libraries the same as No. 4.

6. Allows parents to see what their children have checked out of the library.

For proposing these common-sense provisions, Sullivan was pilloried by opinion writers in this paper and elsewhere as a "book banner" and "clown." The obligatory overheated (pun intended) Bradbury allusions arrived with all the surprise of a vintage Swiss watch's date changeover, as did the darkly intoned warnings about Bücherverbrennungen and jackboots.

Then a coalition of libraries, bookstores, and national trade associations--including the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (capes optional)--sued. They shopped the case to the Fayetteville federal-trial court, hoping to land liberal judge Timothy Brooks. They succeeded, and he enjoined sections one and five of the law--also sticking Arkansas taxpayers with a nearly half-million-dollar attorney's fee bill.

I wrote here that Brooks' decision wouldn't hold. My confidence was neither clairvoyance nor hubris. It was logic. Last year, the Fifth Circuit disposed of a similar lawsuit in Texas. That court wrote:

"[W]e note with amusement (and some dismay) the unusually over-caffeinated arguments made in this case. Judging from the rhetoric in the briefs, one would think Llano County had planned to stage a book burning in front of the library. Plaintiffs and amici warn of 'book bans,' 'pyres of burned books,' 'totalitarian regimes,' and the 'Index librorum prohibitorum.' One amicus intones: 'Where they burn books, they will........

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