Penguin Random House and eight co-plaintiffs have renewed their legal challenge to Iowa’s school book ban. The coalition of the country’s largest publishing houses, the Author’s Guild, two bestselling authors whose works have been pulled from school libraries because of the ban, and an Urbandale High School alum who was still a student when Gov. Kim Reynolds signed the ban into law in 2023, filed an amended complaint in their lawsuit against the ban at the end of July.
“Our goal is simple: to ensure all students have access to the books they need to learn, grow, and understand the world around them,” Dan Novack, vice president and associate general counsel at Penguin Random House, said in a statement.
The school book ban was part of a wide-ranging education bill, SF 496, that passed the Iowa House and Senate with only Republican support. SF 496 requires schools to remove all books with “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act,” except for approved science or health class texts. In addition to banning those books from schools, it also prohibited “any program, curriculum, test, survey, questionnaire, promotion or instruction” referencing sexual identity or gender orientation in K-6 schools. It also prohibits teachers and other school personnel from using a student’s preferred name or pronouns without written permission from parents if they are “different than the name or pronoun assigned to the student in the school district’s registration forms or records.”
During debate on the book-banning provision of SF 496, Republican lawmakers focused on LGBTQ-themed books, calling them everything from inappropriate to pornographic, but finally settled on the broad language regarding sex in books. After it was pointed out that SF 496 could result in the Bible being removed from school libraries, Republicans added an exemption for the Bible and other religious texts.
SF 496 was scheduled to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2024, but in November 2023, the ACLU of Iowa and Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund filed a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of both the book ban and the anti-LGBTQ classroom restrictions on behalf of seven students and Iowa Safe Schools. Two days later, another lawsuit challenging the book ban was filed.
The second lawsuit was brought by Penguin Random House and four authors whose books were removed from schools in an attempt to comply with the book ban — Laurie Halse Anderson, John Green, Malinda Lo and Jodi Picoult — as well as an Iowa high school student, three Iowa educators and the state’s largest teachers union, the Iowa State Education Association. Eventually, the Author’s Guild and four other major publishers — Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, MacMillan Publishing Group and Simon & Schuster — joined the lawsuit. The plaintiffs’ case was supported by friend-of-the-court briefs from groups including PEN America, the Freedom to Read Foundation, American Association of School Librarians, American Booksellers for Free Expression, Association of American Publishers, Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and Independent Book Publishers Association.
U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Locher combined the two lawsuits, and three days before SF 496 was supposed to take effect, he issued a preliminary injunction stopping enforcement of the challenged provision.
In August 2024, a three-judge panel of the Eight Circuit Court of Appeals lifted the injunction and sent the case back to Locher, instructing him to use the criteria set forth by the U.S. Supreme Court in its NetChoice v. Paxon decision. Locher could not have used that criteria, because the Supreme Court didn’t issue its decision until seven months after the SF 496 injunction was issued.
After considering the case in accordance with the appeals court’s instruction, Locher issued another preliminary injunction against SF 496’s book ban in March 2025. The judge found the plaintiffs “have established, at minimum, several dozen unconstitutional applications of Senate File 496 involving books that have undeniable political, artistic, literary, and/or scientific value” and that the bill resulted in schools removing “non-fiction books about important historical events.”
On April 6, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday vacated the preliminary injunction, finding the plaintiffs were unlikely to win their case. In a separate ruling issued that day, the three-judge panel vacated the preliminary injunction against SF 496’s other anti-LGBTQ provisions Locher issued two months after his book ban injunction. The appeals court decision allowed the state to fully enforce SF 496’s provisions.
The coalition led by Penguin Random House petitioned the Eighth Circuit for an en banc rehearing on the book ban injunction, but the petition was rejected in May.
“While it is unfortunate that the Eighth Circuit declined to consider renewing the injunction, the case is far from over,” Dan Novack of Penguin Random House said at the time. “The state conceded that many books have been inappropriately removed by districts, and we will continue to fight for the return of more books to shelves.”
On July 27, Penguin Random House and its co-plaintiffs filed an amended complaint in the case in the U.S. District Court in Des Moines. It is a streamlined and more narrowly focused version of the original complaint in the case. It is focused on nine books that have been removed from schools in Iowa because of SF 496.
“After nearly three years of litigation and the ‘overzealous enforcement’ of Iowa’s law, the amended complaint marks the next phase of the case,” Penguin Random House said in a news release. “It asks the court to enforce the Eighth Circuit’s ruling that Iowa’s law applies only to books containing reasonably detailed descriptions of specific sex acts, meaning many books removed under SF 496 should never have been pulled from school shelves. The complaint also seeks First Amendment protections for works of universally recognized literary and historical value.”
The nine books cited in the amended complaint are 1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, Native Son by Richard Wright, Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult, The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang, Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. All have been removed by at least one school district in Iowa that was attempting to comply with the book ban created by SF 496.
“The Eighth Circuit made clear that Iowa’s law applies far more narrowly than the State had previously argued,” Novack said. “Our amended complaint asks the court to enforce those limits for books that should never have been removed from school shelves and establish precedent that protects works of extraordinary literary and historical value. These nine books demonstrate how SF 496 — and its overzealous enforcement — has resulted in the erasure of history, depriving Iowan students of essential information, stories, and ideas.”
Penguin Random House is joined in the amended complaint by four other major book publishers — Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster — the Authors Guild, Laurie Halse Anderson, who wrote Speak, Jodi Picoult, the author of Nineteen Minutes, and Grace Van Gundy, an Urbandale High School alum who was still a student when SF 496 was signed into law.
