The Idaho Senate on Wednesday passed a late-session bill meant to address concerns in recent court challenges of the state’s 2024 “library bill.”

The Legislature passed a bill in 2024 prohibiting material deemed “harmful to minors” from being made available to minors under 18 in school and public libraries. The law has since been challenged in two separate lawsuits: by a coalition of national book publishers, authors, the Donnelly Public Library and Idaho parents and students; and by a group of private schools and libraries.

Nampa Republican Sen. Todd Lakey said Senate Bill 1448 was meant to clarify language about what’s harmful to minors, what’s constitutionally protected, and what’s not considered harmful. The bill was introduced Monday; other versions to clarify the same law were proposed in the House in March.

Legislators are hoping to end the 2026 session this week.

The bill changes definitions to the state’s obscenity law and the library law to clarify that material considered both sexually explicit material and harmful to minors may not be made available to minors. It clarifies in both cases that the law doesn’t restrict materials that, when considered as a whole, have serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value for minors aged 13 to 17.

Senate Assistant Minority Leader James Ruchti, a Pocatello Democrat, expressed frustration that the bill was responding to legal concerns that were brought up when the bill was considered by the Legislature in 2024.

“We spend a lot of time taking up bills from last year and the year before that should have just been written correctly the first time,” Ruchti said. “… and so these sessions are going to get more complicated, more convoluted.”

The Legislature passed and the governor signed House Bill 710 in 2024 after two years of debate around the topic, which supporters said was in response to concerns that young people were being exposed to explicit materials in school and public libraries.

The bill requires materials considered harmful to be moved to an “adults-only” section of libraries, and it allows people to bring private lawsuits if materials aren’t moved after a request has been made to do so.

It started in 2022 with a bill that would’ve criminalized librarians that check out materials considered harmful to minors.

Idaho librarians at the time argued its broad definitions may have a chilling effect on free speech.