Judge James Ho's Concurrence in the Fifth Circuit Library Decision: Positive Rights vs. Negative Rights

An excerpt from Judge Ho’s concurrence in the Little v. Llano County en banc decision (he also joined the majority opinion as to listener interests and the seven-judge decision as to library curation decisions being government speech):

The Constitution protects “the freedom of speech.” That freedom ensures that citizens are free to speak—not that we may force others to respond. It’s the First Amendment, not FOIA.

So “[t]here is … no basis for the claim that the First Amendment compels others—private persons or government—to supply information.” The Supreme Court “has never intimated a First Amendment guarantee of a right of access to all sources of information within government control.” “The First and Fourteenth Amendments do not guarantee the public a right of access to information generated or controlled by government.”

Our Founders enacted a charter of negative liberties. “[L]iberty in the eighteenth century was thought of much more in relation to ‘negative liberty’; that is, freedom from, not freedom to.” …

The fundamental distinction between negative and positive rights is essential to a proper understanding of the First Amendment.

Consider how the law treats public museums. It’s well understood that you have no First Amendment claim just because a public museum won’t feature the art or exhibit you wish to view. That’s because, as today’s en banc majority opinion explains, when a government funds and operates a museum, it necessarily acts as a curator for the public’s benefit—and there is no First Amendment claim when the government is curating, not regulating.

So a public museum “may decide to display busts of Union Army generals of the Civil War, or the curator may decide to exhibit only busts of Confederate generals. The First Amendment has nothing to do with such choices.” PETA v. Gittens (D.C. Cir. 2005). See also, e.g., Pulphus v. Ayers (D.D.C. 2017) (rejecting First Amendment claim by an artist challenging the removal of his painting from a Congressional art competition); Raven v. Sajet (D.D.C. 2018) (rejecting First Amendment claim to require display of a portrait of the then-President-Elect at the National Portrait Gallery).

That should end this case, because I see no principled First Amendment distinction between public museums and public libraries.

And neither do Plaintiffs. During oral argument, counsel for Plaintiffs was given repeated opportunities to draw a distinction between public museums and public libraries for purposes of First Amendment analysis. They repeatedly declined to do so. They didn’t, because they can’t….

The dissent appears to accept that the freedom of speech embodies negative, not positive, rights. The dissent focuses instead on a different distinction. It theorizes that the First Amendment does not require a public library to buy certain books—but it does forbid a public library from removing them, having already bought them. As the dissent puts it, it’s “not an affirmative right to demand access to particular materials,” but rather “a negative right against government censorship.” So “[t]he First Amendment does not require Llano County either to buy and shelve … or to keep [certain books]; but it does prohibit Llano County from removing [them].”

But I confess that I have trouble locating in the First Amendment a distinction between refusing to purchase certain books (which the dissent would allow) and removing them (which the dissent would condemn).

Consider how we would treat the proposed distinction in other constitutional contexts. Does the Fourteenth Amendment allow a government agency to refuse to hire people based on their race—just so long as they don’t fire people based on their race? Does the Free Exercise Clause permit a public park to exclude all Christians from entry—it just can’t kick them out once they’ve been let in? Obviously not. No one would draw those distinctions. And the same logic should apply here. If viewpoint discrimination is forbidden, then viewpoint discrimination is forbidden.

So it’s not surprising that Plaintiffs appear to concede that they would forbid public libraries from refusing to purchase as well as remove certain books.

I also wonder about the workability of the proposed distinction. Imagine that someone donates their book collection to a local library upon their death. But it turns out that the collection contains some of the material at issue in this case. So the library declines to accept those particular items. Is that refusing to purchase (and therefore permitted)? Or is that removing (and therefore forbidden)? Suppose the entire book collection has already been boxed up, so the estate administrator tells the librarian to either take the entire collection or refuse it whole. So the librarian can’t accept custody of certain books while declining others—it can only remove those books after accepting them. Does that make a difference? Why should it?

It seems more principled to me to conclude that the First Amendment permits all of this, because like public museums, public libraries have to make decisions about which materials to include in, and exclude from, their collections. I’m sure we could all find ways to quibble with how a particular library or museum curates their collections. But curators are not regulators. And I have difficulty determining which curating decisions are subject to scrutiny, and which are exempt, consistent with the text and original understanding of the First Amendment….

Plaintiffs have a First Amendment right to read books. They don’t have a First Amendment right to force a public library to provide them….

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