Booksellers Ask U.S. Court of Appeals to Overturn Oregon Decision


NEW YORK, NY, February 5, 2009 – The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE), the bookseller’s voice in the fight against censorship, announced today that it would join a group of Oregon booksellers in appealing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit a recent decision upholding an Oregon law that could restrict the sale of books, magazines and other material to minors. In April, ABFFE joined the booksellers and members of Media Coalition in challenging the law because it is vague and lacks procedural safeguards for material that is protected by the First Amendment. “We continue to believe the law does not give booksellers clear guidelines for determining what they can legally sell to a minor,” ABFFE President Chris Finan said. “We are asking the appeals court to ensure that Oregon provides all of the safeguards that the U.S. Supreme Court requires for constitutionally protected material.”

The law makes it a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail to allow a minor under 13 to view or purchase a “sexually explicit” work. It also makes it a crime to furnish anyone under 18 with a visual representation or verbal description of sexual conduct for the purpose of arousing or satisfying the sexual desire of the person or the minor.

In upholding the law on Dec. 12, U.S District Court Judge Michael W. Mosman acknowledged that it does not meet the precise terms of the test established by the Supreme

Court: it does not require that the work be patently offensive or appeal to prurient interest or that it be considered as a whole. There is also no protection for material that has serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value. However, Judge Mosman declared that the statute and other provisions of state law provide protections that are functionally equivalent to the Supreme Court test.

The Oregon booksellers participating in the challenge are Powell’s Books, Annie Bloom’s Books, and St. John’s Booksellers, all located in Portland; Paulina Springs Books, which has stores in Sisters and Redmond, and Colette’s Good Food + Hungry Minds in North Bend.

The Media Coalition members who are plaintiffs are the Association of American Publishers, the Freedom to Read Foundation, and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. The other local plaintiffs are Planned Parenthood of the Columbia/Willamette, Inc., Cascade AIDS Project, the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon and Candace Morgan.