Pico v. Island Trees: Ruling, Dissent, and First Amendment Legacy

In Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District No. 26 v. Pico, decided in 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that a public school board violates the First Amendment when it removes books from school libraries because it disagrees with the ideas those books contain.¹ It is the only time the Supreme Court has directly addressed school library censorship, which is why the case still anchors nearly every legal fight over removing books from public school shelves.

What the School Board Did

In September 1975, three members of the Island Trees school board attended a conference held by Parents of New York United, a conservative education group, and came home with a list of books the group considered objectionable. They checked their district’s libraries and found eleven titles from that list on the shelves, including Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, the anonymous drug memoir Go Ask Alice, and Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer.²

In February 1976, the board ordered the books pulled for review. When the removals drew press coverage, the board issued a statement calling the books “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy.” A committee of parents and staff was appointed to look at the titles, and it recommended returning most of them. The board rejected that recommendation and ordered the books removed permanently.¹

Five students, led by high schooler Steven Pico, sued under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, arguing that the removal violated their First Amendment rights.² The district court threw the case out on summary judgment. The Second Circuit reversed and ordered a trial, and the school board took the case to the Supreme Court.

What the Supreme Court Decided

The Court affirmed the Second Circuit 5–4, sending the case back for trial rather than ordering the books returned. No single opinion drew five votes, which makes the ruling a plurality decision. Justice Brennan wrote the lead opinion, joined by Justices Marshall and Stevens. Justices Blackmun and White concurred separately in the judgment.¹

Brennan grounded the decision in what he called the right to receive information and ideas, describing it as an inherent corollary of the First Amendment. A marketplace of ideas, he reasoned, needs listeners as well as speakers: “The dissemination of ideas can accomplish nothing if otherwise willing addressees are not free to receive and consider them.”²

The plurality drew a sharp line between the classroom and the library. School boards have broad authority to set curriculum and pick required readings. Libraries are different because students go there voluntarily and choose what to read. Brennan cited Tinker v. Des Moines for the proposition that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”³ The plurality was careful to acknowledge that boards keep significant discretion over library collections. The constitutional problem arises only when that discretion is used, in Brennan’s phrase, “in a narrowly partisan or political manner.”¹

Justice Blackmun agreed with the result but framed the issue more narrowly. For him, the point was not so much a student’s right to receive ideas as the government’s obligation not to suppress them: “the State may not act to deny access to an idea simply because state officials disapprove of that idea for partisan or political reasons.”² Schools remain free, he wrote, to choose one book over another based on relevance, quality, age-appropriateness, or even offensive language.

The Rule That Came Out of the Case

Even without a majority opinion, Pico produced a workable test that lower courts have applied ever since. It is a test about motive.

School boards may remove library books for reasons that are educationally neutral. If a book is poorly written, factually outdated, inappropriate for the age group, or pervasively vulgar, pulling it from the shelves is ordinary administrative judgment and raises no constitutional problem.¹

The removal becomes unconstitutional when the board’s primary motivation is to suppress ideas it dislikes. A board that pulls a novel because of graphic violence aimed at young readers is on solid ground. A board that pulls the same novel because it portrays a government policy in an unflattering light is not. Courts examine the circumstances of the removal, the stated reasons, whether the board followed its own procedures, and whether the action singled out particular viewpoints rather than particular content problems. Vague labels like “anti-American” or “filthy” tend to invite the same judicial scrutiny that the Island Trees board drew.

The Dissent

Four justices dissented: Chief Justice Burger and Justices Powell, Rehnquist, and O’Connor. Their central objection was that the plurality was pulling federal judges into decisions that belong to locally elected school boards.

Burger rejected the idea that students have a constitutional right to find particular books in a school library, noting the books remained available at public libraries and bookstores. Rehnquist argued that a school district acts as an educator, not a sovereign, when it decides what to teach and stock, and he saw no principled way to distinguish between declining to buy a book and removing one already purchased.² Powell warned that the plurality’s “narrowly partisan or political” standard gave boards no real guidance and would invite constant litigation, so that “any junior high school student, by instituting a suit against a school board or teacher, may invite a judge to overrule an educational decision by the official body designated by the people to operate the schools.”¹ O’Connor added that a board with power to select books logically has the power to discontinue them.

What Happened to the Books

The Supreme Court did not order the books back on the shelves. It sent the case down for a trial on the board’s actual motives. Before that trial happened, the Island Trees board voted to return the books to the library. Steven Pico later said his goal from the start had been to see the nine library books returned without restriction, and “that’s what ultimately happened.” The case settled without a trial on the merits.

Why the Case Still Matters

Because Pico is the Supreme Court’s only direct pronouncement on public school library censorship, it carries weight out of proportion to its fractured vote count. Lower federal courts continue to treat it as the governing framework whenever a library removal ends up in litigation. The classroom-versus-library distinction has held up: boards get more latitude over assigned readings than over books that sit on the shelves for voluntary use.

As book challenges in public schools have climbed in recent years, both sides of the fight cite the decision. Boards defending removals point to the plurality’s acknowledgment that they retain wide discretion and may act on grounds like vulgarity or age-appropriateness. Parents and students challenging removals point to the core holding that political or ideological hostility toward a book’s ideas cannot justify pulling it from a library. Because the ruling was a plurality rather than a full majority, the exact boundaries remain contested, and a future Supreme Court case could narrow or broaden its reach. For now, Pico stands as the strongest legal authority for the idea that a school library is a place for voluntary inquiry rather than a curated list of ideas the board is willing to let students see.

1
Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District No. 26 v. Pico by Pico
2
Cornell Law School. Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District No. 26 v. Pico
3
Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District