Island Trees v. Pico The Battle Ahead

There is a Federal District Judge in Boston, Joseph Tauro, whose passion for the First Amendment would have greatly gratified James Madison. In 1978, Tauro presided over a school library censorship case. The trial, involving one poem in the anthology, Male and Female Under Eighteen, was attended by more than a hundred students at Chelsea High School (where the poem was under attack). Taking every available seat in the courtroom, the kids watched in fascination as their right to read the poem was contested by the school board's asserting its right to protect the students from the words and the ideas in the poem.