U.S. Supreme Court OKs Texas Age-Verification Law for Porn Sites

In a 6-3 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Friday that a Texas law aimed at preventing minors from accessing obscene material online by requiring porn sites to verify the ages of their users does not violate the First Amendment.

The law requires the sites to “comply with a commercial age verification system” that uses “government-issued identification” or “a commercially reasonable method that relies on public or private transactional data.”

The Legislature passed House Bill 1181 in 2023, and it was soon challenged by a trade association for the pornography industry, a group of companies that operate pornographic websites and a pornography performer. A U.S. District Court issued an injunction temporarily halting the law, but the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that. Now, finally, the Supreme Court has given Texas the final go-ahead.

In an opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas and joined by the court's conservative majority, the court ruled that the state has a compelling interest in keeping minors from accessing obscene material that adults have a First Amendment right to view. The majority declined to apply that standard of "strict scrutiny" it frequently uses to evaluate laws that burden free-speech rights. That standard would have required Texas to demonstrate that the law served a compelling government interest and was narrowly tailored to use the least restrictive means of achieving it.

Thomas wrote that since the law targeted obscene material that would otherwise be legally off-limits for minors, a lower standard applied. Any burden placed on adults who have the right to access the sites was incidental to the purpose of the law and not overly restrictive. In his opinion, Thomas compared HB 1181 to statutes that require age verification to purchase pornography from retail shops or to buy items such as cigarettes and alcohol.

“This is a major victory for children, parents, and the ability of states to protect minors from the damaging effects of online pornography,” Texas Attorney General Paxton said in a press release. “Companies have no right to expose children to pornography and must institute reasonable age verification measures. I will continue to enforce the law against any organization that refuses to take the necessary steps to protect minors from explicit materials.”

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, argued that the majority abandoned decades of its own precedents by not applying the strict scrutiny standard, which would have required Texas to demonstrate that there were not other options to accomplish the goal of preventing minors from accessing pornography that wouldn't have burdened adults' lawful right to view the material.