First Amendment versus teens @ Your library

Well, it’s everywhere in the biblioblogosphere, so I must comment.

Maplewood’s public library is shutting it’s doors immediately after school to prevent troublesome kids from causing problems. Though I agree that you don’t protect customers’ right to have a quiet library by, um, kicking them out, the comments on Jessmyn’s post have insights into why this might be a serious problem.

Regardless of issues with fights, screaming matches, vandalism and various unsundry problems that exist, I’m surprised I have not yet seen comment on the First Amendment implications of the situation. Though Kreimer v. Morristown and Nienast v. Columbus establish that users who “interfere or disrupt the library’s reasonable rules of operation,” can be removed or otherwise denied access, the reason for that removal is to protect other’s First Amendment rights. I would be interested to see how people react to having their First Amendment rights denied in order to maintain some sort of simplicity for staff.

A quick look at Westlaw shows me nothing directly related to dealing with groups of people disrupting library access by creating a blanket ban (I suppose a ban on religious groups in meeting rooms provides some interesting analogues). I would be interested to see this litigated and will do more research to see if there is any sort of case law relating to said issue.

As an interesting sidenote, the top link in the Google search for “Kreimer v. Morristown” gives me Nienast’s page as the top result. Given how Google’s page rankings work, there must be someone who cares a great deal about these issues.