In what defendants called “a total victory,” a Virginia Beach Circuit Court judge yesterday dismissed the case brought earlier this year seeking to have Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer: A Memoir and Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Mist and Fury declared obscene and to bar Barnes & Noble from selling the books to minors without parental consent–an expansion in the current efforts to ban books in schools and libraries.
In dismissing the case, judge Pamela S. Baskervill ruled that under Virginia law the court didn’t have the authority to declare the books obscene and that applicable Virginia law was unconstitutional because its use of prior restraint violates due process. She also threw out a previous order finding probable cause that the books might be obscene.
