Two important First Amendment cases have been issued by Texas district courts in the last month (or so).  In Cribbs Ringer v. Comal ISD (Nov. 18, 2025), a second federal judge in San Antonio has issued an injunction that declares Senate Bill 10, the Texas Ten Commandments statute, to be unconstitutional.   Although Judge Orlando Garcia’s reasons for finding the statute unconstitutional are largely consistent with – if not as  colorful as – Judge Fred Biery’s opinion back in August 2025 in Nathan v. Alamo Heights ISD, Judge Garcia’s decision comes after the Fifth Circuit vacated its panel decision in the Louisiana Ten Commandments litigation (Roake v. Brumley), by granting en banc review. Presumably because of that, Judge Garcia focused on whether the Supreme Court’s 45 year old prohibition on posting the Ten Commandments in public schools (Stone v. Graham) survived the Supreme Court’s recent abrogation of the much-despised Lemon test, and concluded that it did.  After ordering the involved school districts to take down any Ten Commandment posters that have already been put up – and certify to the Court that they have done so –  Judge Garcia then stayed his own decision until the Fifth Circuit resolves the Brumley/Nathan appeals.

Last  month, Judge Alan Albright issued a permanent injunction in Book People, Inc. v. Wong, declaring parts of the READER Act – the 2023 law that aimed to regulate the content of public school libraries to protect children from “obscene” content – unconstitutional.  Judge Albright’s permanent injunction is largely similar to the temporary injunction he issued against the READER Act after it was passed in 2023, which was mostly upheld by the Fifth Circuit in 2024.  While Judge Albright and the Fifth Circuit agreed that the purpose of the READER Act was laudatory, it was its means for accomplishing its goals with which they found fault, and specifically, its provisions that put the burden of policing books on the third party private publishing companies doing business with school districts.  READER required the publishing companies to assign each book one of three ratings:  “sexually explicit,” “sexual relevant,” and “no rating”.  Not only were they not to sell any “sexually explicit” books to public schools, they were to somehow issue a recall for all “sexually explicit” materials that they had ever sold to schools.

But of crucial importance, TEA had the power to overrule the publishing companies’ ratings (with no appeals), and then force the publishing companies to accept and enforce the TEA ratings as if they were their own.  It was this “compelled speech” aspect of the law that the judge (and previously the Fifth Circuit) had found violated the First Amendment rights of the publishing companies:

If Texas’s aim was solely to create conditions for the State to purchase books for its public school libraries, it failed to accomplish that with READER. READER operates in a way that fully compels Plaintiffs’ speech—violating both prongs of the prohibition discussed in 303 Creative.  First, READER compels Plaintiffs’ speech when they would choose to remain silent, because Plaintiffs must assign ratings even if they would not want to. Second, READER compels Plaintiffs to adopt the government’s speech because the TEA is allowed to re-rate books and publish its own rating as being attributed to Plaintiffs. Plaintiffs have no choice but to accept the government’s speech as their own.

….

As this Court previously discussed in its order granting Plaintiffs a preliminary injunction, the government has the power to do the contextual ratings for the books itself. ECF No. 43 at 37. The government has the power to restrict what books its school purchase, within the confines of the Constitution, and there is a meaningful interest in curating educational content for children. Id. But those powers should be exercised by the state directly—not by compelling third parties to perform it or risk losing any opportunity to engage in commerce with school districts. While READER may seek to achieve a noble and important goal, it cannot do so by compelling Plaintiffs’ speech in both ways the Supreme Court has clearly forbidden.\

The court also found the relevant portions of the READER Act to be unconstitutionally vague and a prior restraint on protected speech, in large part because READER created a new definition of “obscenity” that ignored the third prong of the Supreme Court’s long-standing Miller/Ginsberg test for defining obscenity:  whether the material lacks “serious literary, artistic, pollical, or scientific value”.   This meant the law prohibited the distribution of books “possibly protected by the First Amendment.”

This is not the last word in either case: the Cribbs Ringer decision will stand or fall based on the outcome of the Brumley/Nathan appeals, and Book People was almost immediately appealed by the State.  So stay tuned for further developments in these important First Amendment cases.