Following the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals decision not to rehear a case challenging Iowa Senate File 496, a statewide book banning law, Penguin Random House and its co-plaintiffs filed an amended complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa on July 27.

The plaintiffs include the Big Five publishers, the Authors Guild, authors Laurie Halse Anderson and Jodi Picoult, and Urbandale (Iowa) High School graduate Grace Van Gundy, who’s been involved in the case since her student years. Defendants include Iowa State Board of Education president John Robbins, Iowa Department of Education director McKenzie Snow, and Iowa school board directors.

In addition, Sourcebooks has been a part of the plaintiff coalition since the other Big Five publishers joined PRH, but is not a formal plaintiff in this case. Authors John Green and Malinda Lo, who were plaintiffs in earlier iterations of the lawsuit, are not among the parties to this complaint, although Green’s Looking for Alaska and Lo’s Last Night at the Telegraph Club remain banned in Iowa.

SF 496 prohibits “any material with descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act” from Iowa school districts, and the Eighth Circuit has ruled that the law applies only to materials that demonstrably contain such information. The amended complaint therefore argues that many books lacking any such descriptions of a “sex act” were unjustly removed under the law.

The plaintiffs have provided nine specific titles—among the hundreds of individual ISBNs removed from Iowa K–12 schools—as examples for the court’s consideration.

“We really want to streamline it—the less complicated, the better,” PRH VP and general counsel Dan Novack told PW. In other words, the court can review nine well-known titles much more quickly than dozens of contested titles.

Novack noted that the two earlier filings of PRH v. Robbins, the first in November 2023 and the second in September 2024, challenged the whole of SF 496 as unconstitutional rather than looking at how the law is applied to specific materials. Although District Court Judge Stephen H. Locher has twice ordered preliminary injunctions against SF 496, Eighth Circuit panels have twice vacated and remanded those decisions back to the district court.

“Every time we go to the Eighth, they give us a little more information about how they do the law,” Novack said. “We’ve now hit our heads against the wall twice, trying to do this as a facial challenge, and they keep knocking it back.” In the amended complaint, he noted, “we adjusted to reflect that they wanted more analysis of the statute’s legitimate sweep versus its illegitimate sweep.”

The plaintiffs now ask the court to assess the law “as applied,” Novack said, with attention to the exact content of the work in question. They believe that the court will find the law was broadly applied to materials that do not meet its strict standards—for instance, by removing books that make reference to sexual contact without describing anything explicitly. Iif you get one book across the finish line, it can have the same effect as all the books,” Novack said.

The titles chosen for the amended complaint include plaintiff Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak; Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II; Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World; Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird; George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984; Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes; and Richard Wright’s Native Son.

The plaintiffs assert in the filing that none of the books “contain content that is within the scope of the Library Restriction,” and that even if the books are found to contain such content, their removal still violates the Free Speech Clause of the U.S. Constitution. According to a statement from PRH, “the complaint also seeks First Amendment protections for works of universally recognized literary and historical value.”

Novack explained that the plaintiffs included Angelou’s 1969 memoir and Chang’s 1997 history as examples of educational nonfiction; the novels on the short list show a range of fiction from the 20th century to present.

“I’m optimistic that the state could agree that 1984 does not belong on this list [of pulled titles], because it lacks the specific language of the statute,” he said. “We think this is a pathway that can get dozens of books back.”