Can the school board remove "that book" - whatever it may be - from the high school library?
This episode reviews the First Amendment's guidelines on that issue, established by the Supreme Court's one case in the area, in 1982. It examined whether the school board's :(impermissible) motive to restrict student access to a particular message was the reason for a book's removal, as opposed to a (permissible) motive related to education or appropriateness for the audience's age.
After reviewing that case and two examples of how lower courts have applied it, the episode makes two suggestions about the law today: (1) the balance struck 1982 case, featuring a dissent by Justice Rehnquist, would likely not be the same balance that today's more-conservative Supreme Court strike, and (2) another early-1980s First Amendment case, about the then-important issue of speech rights in shopping malls, teaches that the world of information has changed a lot since then, and that school libraries may now be as peripheral to the mainstream exchange of ideas as shopping malls.