The county common pleas court denied Neinast’s motion for summary judgment, so he appealed his case. But the Ohio appellate court upheld the library’s policy January 26, ruling that the “prohibition against bare feet in the library is related to governmental interests of protecting barefoot library patrons from documented hazards within the library and preserving the economic well-being of the library.”
Neinast, a member of the Society for Barefoot Living who has been “going barefoot nearly continuously since mid-1997,” according to a 2001 court affidavit, is a retired software engineer.
Posted February 3, 2006.