A state law that led to the removal of hundreds of books from school libraries is now in the hands of the Missouri Supreme Court.
The court heard arguments Wednesday over the law. The state is seeking a reversal of a decision from a Jackson County Circuit Court judge, who ruled the law unconstitutional for being overbroad as well as vague.
The original plaintiffs in the case, including the Missouri Association of School Librarians and the Missouri Library Association, want the Missouri Supreme Court to uphold the ruling.
Legislators passed the law in 2022. It created a misdemeanor offense for distributing sexual material to a student. The new law applied to people "affiliated with a public or private elementary or secondary school in an official capacity."
Librarians and others, if convicted, could have faced up to a year in jail or a $2,000 fine for violating the policy.
Speaking for the state, Deputy Solicitor General Graham Miller pushed back on the idea that the law was too broad.
"Under this court's precedent, an obscenity statute containing this standard can neither be overbroad nor void for vagueness," Miller said.
Miller also said the state is free to adopt other statutes related to obscenity "as long as the definitions state within the bounds set by the constitutional standard."
The constitutional standard repeatedly mentioned in court comes from a 1973 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, Miller v. California.
The case created the Miller test, which has three criteria that must be met to ban a piece of media.
Supreme Court Judge Mary Russell spoke on the statute in court Wednesday, saying it appears to "completely omit that first standard of Miller."
That first standard requires an average person to deem the material, when taken as a whole, to appeal to the prurient interest.
Miller said that although it is true the statute doesn't state prurient interest, it does prohibit explicit sexual material and that "explicit sexual material is obscene for minors."
"In the Supreme Court's Paxton decision, the Supreme Court used both these terms interchangeably, and stated that minors possess a more restrictive right to judge and determine for themselves what sex material they may read or see," Miller said.
Miller is referring to a 2025 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that upheld Texas' age verification law for pornography websites. Miller also said there is nothing stopping the state from having overlapping criminal statutes.
Missouri Supreme Court Chief Justice W. Brent Powell asked Miller if the state, through the law, was trying to expand the amount of material that would be labeled as explicit.
"It seems the new statute wants to go beyond that. That's what I'm confused about," Powell said. "I agree with you, we have overlapping criminal statutes all over the criminal code, but it seems to be that there's an effort to go beyond what is currently banned."
Representing the plaintiffs in the case, David Thoreson asked the court to uphold the circuit court's decision.
He said speech protection under the Missouri Constitution's Article 1, Section 8 is a "binary question."
"Either a work satisfies all three of Miller's conditions and is unprotected obscenity, or the work is fully protected by Article 1, Section 8," Thoreson said.
Thoreson also said this new statute does not have any overlap with the Miller test and is ultimately creating new ground.
"It chose not to use the three-part Miller definition or cross-reference the term of art, pornographic for minors, and instead either replicated the explicit sexual material definition from a different statute, or labored to craft an entirely new prohibition," Thoreson said.
Speaking after court, Gillian Wilcox with the ACLU of Missouri said the law is hard to follow and extends into protected free speech.
"This law was passed, we believe, to expand that into books that are protected by speech and due process, and it did cause books that should be in school libraries to be pulled," Wilcox said.
Wilcox said because of the law, many of the books pulled were graphic novels, art books or other mainly visual works that schools worried would be found breaking the statute.
"School librarians are so afraid of being criminally punished that they went through their libraries and pulled hundreds of graphic novels that do not have obscenity in them," Wilcox said.
The Missouri Supreme Court did not issue a ruling Wednesday.
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