"Anyone who knows anything about reading legal opinions would know better than to extract a litigant's contention as the opinion of the court." (original all-caps "shouting" eliminated) Well, all I can say is that anyone who knows anything about reading -- period -- would know that that was quoted as a summary of the *challenge* not the opinion of the court ("The complaint.. alleged.... It also alleged..."). As I stated in the original post, "The court ruled against banning books based on their content but ruled that school districts can be held financially liable if they do not address racially hostile environments at schools." This second part was not my main concern, but according to news reports in the Los Angeles Times and Arizona Republic, the court set a new standard for assessing liability for failure to address racially hosile environments in schools "that parallels the standards for proving workplace harrassment." The lawyer arguing the case undoubtedly used the "hostile work environment" language to create that parallel while the case itself, as I said and the lawyer friend agrees, was based on civil rights legislation. The Arizona Republic article will soon be moved to its premium archive but is still online for free at http://www.azcentral.com:80/sev/news/1022huckfinn.shtml As I said, the challenges in Maryland were made through school boards, not the courts. A Washington Post article about them is still available at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/longterm/war.htm What I think is interesting in the Arizona case is that civil rights legislation was used to move a challenge to class readings to the courts. That is definitely very unusual and I was wondering if it was the first time it had been tried. I think that this kind of civil rights-based strategy for challenging literature assignments in the curriculum is a new one that we are likely to see used again in other communities, though not necessarily involving the courts. In February 1998 the Pennsylvania NAACP urged students and parents to file grievances with the State Human Rights Commission if their schools did not remove Huckleberry Finn from required reading lists. In March, two members of the San Francisco school board proposed an affirmative action-like quota requiring that the ethnicity of authors studied approximate the ethnicity of the student population. In San Francisco they ended up with a compromise solution that created a more diverse set of required readings without a specific quota. The specific grievance that was supposed to be filed in Pennsylvania was never specified in the press reports but the president of the state NAACP explained that their campaign to remove the book from reading lists grew out of a broader campaign against hate crimes. The "chilling" effect that Gregg Camfield noted from this kind of challenge is quite broad. The Arizona court also noted the negative effects of the threat of litigation in the part of its opinion about the curriculum. Since posting the question about previous legal challenges to books someone on another list to which it was forwarded has responded that there was a case in Alabama in the mid-1980s where parents claimed that use of a specific textbook was equivalent to forcing children to study "a religion called secular humanism." According to the person who wrote me about that case, "The trial judge initially ruled in plaintiffs' favor, but the case was overturned on appeal." I was wondering if the Arizona case was the first time a book was challenged through the courts but this Alabama case followed a similar strategy by challenging the textbook on religious grounds. Jim Zwick