236
Souter, J., dissenting
A
Public libraries are indeed selective in what they acquire to place in their stacks, as they must be. There is only so much money and so much shelf space, and the necessity to choose some material and reject the rest justifies the effort to be selective with an eye to demand, quality, and the object of maintaining the library as a place of civilized enquiry by widely different sorts of people. Selectivity is thus necessary and complex, and these two characteristics explain why review of a library's selection decisions must be limited: the decisions are made all the time, and only in extreme cases could one expect particular choices to reveal impermissible reasons (reasons even the plurality would consider to be illegitimate), like excluding books because their authors are Democrats or their critiques of organized Christianity are unsympathetic. See Board of Ed., Island Trees Union Free School Dist. No. 26 v. Pico, 457 U. S. 853, 870-871 (1982) (plurality opinion). Review for rational basis is probably the most that any court could conduct, owing to the myriad particular selections that might be attacked by someone, and the difficulty of untangling the play of factors behind a particular decision.
At every significant point, however, the Internet blocking here defies comparison to the process of acquisition. Whereas traditional scarcity of money and space require a library to make choices about what to acquire, and the choice to be made is whether or not to spend the money to acquire something, blocking is the subject of a choice made after the money for Internet access has been spent or committed.
made available to a library's patrons. If, therefore, a librarian refused to get a book from interlibrary loan for an adult patron on the ground that the patron's "purpose" in seeking the book was not acceptable, the librarian could find no justification in the fact that libraries have traditionally "collect[ed] only those materials deemed to have 'requisite and appropriate quality.' " Ante, at 204. In any event, in the ensuing analysis, I assume for the sake of argument that we are in a world without interlibrary loan.
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