A federal appeals court ruled Monday that Escambia County School Board members must sit for depositions about their votes to remove and restrict more than 100 books from district libraries, rejecting their bid to quash subpoenas on legislative privilege grounds.
Courthouse News reported that seven members of the Florida board asked the 11th Circuit to block questioning on their motives. A majority held those votes were administrative acts under existing policy, not legislative policymaking shielded from discovery.
The ruling keeps alive a 2023 First Amendment lawsuit by parents, authors, PEN American Center Inc., and publisher Penguin Random House. It lands a week after Banned Books Week and forces local officials into sworn testimony over how they applied Florida-required rules on sexual content in school materials.
U.S. Circuit Judge Andrew Brasher wrote the majority opinion. U.S. Circuit Judge Jill Pryor joined him. Chief U.S. Circuit Judge William Pryor dissented.
The majority agreed with the district court. Board members acted as administrators when they voted to pull specific titles as inconsistent with policies already on the books.
Brasher put the holding in plain terms.
"The District Court concluded that when the board members voted to remove specific books as inconsistent with the board’s existing policies, they acted as administrators, not legislators. We agree and affirm."
Circuit precedent treats the touchstone of a legislative act as policymaking rather than mere administrative application of existing policies. The majority applied that line here.
Plaintiffs do not seek to depose the members about creating, repealing, or amending any policies in response to book complaints. The questioning targets the votes on particular books.
Chief Judge William Pryor argued the board members exercised discretion over public policy when they voted on library removals. He said the majority wrongly stripped them of privilege to avoid testifying about those votes.
His dissent framed the point directly.
"Because the members of the Escambia County School Board exercise discretion over a matter of public policy when voting to remove books from school libraries, the majority wrongly strips them of their privilege to avoid testifying about those votes."
The dissent compared the votes to a zoning decision previously treated as legislative. The majority distinguished that case. It involved a request to amend an ordinance, not apply an existing one.
Brasher answered the dissent’s broader research into outside authorities.
"Our dissenting colleague’s independent research may have been comprehensive. But we respectfully suggest that his resort to unraised arguments about far-flung authorities merely underscores that this court’s precedents (which we have obviously addressed in depth) do not support his position."
Florida law required the board to adopt a policy for employees to remove library or instructional materials that are pornographic or that “depict or describe sexual conduct.”
Under the board’s own rules, a challenge triggers review of the objected-to material. The public gets a chance to comment. Then members vote on removal.
That sequence matters to the majority’s administrative label. Officials applied a preset framework rather than writing new policy from scratch on each title.
The mass removals and restrictions traced back to May 2022. Escambia County teacher Vicki Baggett led a campaign to pull books from school libraries over ideological objections to their contents. Hundreds of books were challenged.
Websites affiliated with Moms for Liberty posted rationales and book excerpts. Many challenges mirrored that material. Moms for Liberty is a politically conservative group focused on combating “woke” influence in public schools.
In 2023, a group of parents, authors, PEN American Center Inc., and Penguin Random House sued the Escambia School Board. They claimed the removals violated the First Amendment.
Board members were not named as parties. Plaintiffs still sought their depositions on motivations and decision-making behind the book votes.
Plaintiffs pointed to the Supreme Court’s 1982 decision in Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico. That case said public schools can bar books that are “pervasively vulgar” or unfit for the curriculum. They cannot remove books simply because they dislike the ideas inside them.
The 11th Circuit did not decide the merits of that constitutional claim. It decided only whether the subpoenas could reach the members’ motives for the specific votes.
PEN America, a free speech interest group and a plaintiff in the Escambia suit, has published national tallies it describes as book bans. Courthouse News relayed those figures in coverage of the ruling.
PEN America recorded 11,982 book bans nationwide during the 2025, 26 school year. It called that the highest single-year total it had documented. The count included 4,500 books that had not previously appeared in its Index of School Book Bans. Florida accounted for more than 3,000 in that period, just behind Texas.
Those tallies reflect PEN America’s own definitions and advocacy framing. The Escambia dispute, as described in the court fight, centers on removals and restrictions after formal challenges, public comment, and board votes under state-directed policy on sexual content.
Examples of titles tied to the broader controversy in the reporting include Slaughterhouse-Five, Beloved, and Forever. A full public list of every Escambia title at issue was not detailed in the account of the opinion.
Investigators and litigants will need to determine, through sworn testimony, how each member applied the existing policies to the challenged books. Motives are now fair game in discovery because the majority classified the votes as administrative.
Authorities have not publicly released deposition transcripts or findings in this coverage. No public results have been released about how individual members will explain specific titles.
The procedural posture is narrow but consequential. Local elected officials who followed a notice-and-comment review path now face questioning under oath by lawyers for PEN America, a major publisher, authors, and parents who call the removals unconstitutional.
Brasher is a Donald Trump appointee. Jill Pryor is a Barack Obama appointee. William Pryor is a George W. Bush appointee. The split did not track simple party lines on the privilege question.
School boards across the country set library standards under state statutes. Florida directed boards to clear pornographic material and content that depicts or describes sexual conduct. Escambia built a challenge process around that duty.
Plaintiffs cast the outcome as viewpoint discrimination. The board framed its work as policy application. The 11th Circuit majority sided with the administrative characterization for discovery purposes and left the members exposed to deposition.
The decision does not itself order any book returned to shelves. It does compel testimony about why votes went the way they did once challenges landed on the agenda.
Absolute calendar dates for the Monday opinion, the underlying district court order, and PEN America’s release of the 2025, 26 figures were not stated in the report. The names of the seven individual board members who moved to quash also were not listed.
When school boards enforce state rules on sexual content in children’s libraries, courts that treat those votes as ordinary administration open the door to probing every motive under oath. Local control means little if every contested title becomes a federal discovery fight driven by advocacy groups and corporate publishers.
