Mary Anne Franks (George Washington University – Law School) has posted Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton: The Supreme Court Pretends to Think of the Children on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
There is longstanding, widespread agreement that minors should not have access to certain forms of sexually explicit material that is constitutionally protected for adults. There is considerable debate, however, about how to effectively restrict minors’ access to such material without also greatly burdening adults’ access to it. Texas’s recent legislative attempt to accomplish these goals, H.B. 1181, fails on both fronts. The law, which requires certain online websites that contain sexually explicit material to adopt age verification measures, closely resembles laws that the Supreme Court has previously invalidated on First Amendment grounds. In those cases, Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844 (1997) and Ashcroft v. ACLU, 542 U.S. 656 (2004), the Supreme Court recognized that although protecting children from pornographic material was a laudable and legitimate goal, the measures proposed to do so must meet rigorous standards of effectiveness and narrowness, also known as strict scrutiny, to avoid violating the First Amendment. The Court has historically refused to simply concede to overwrought demands to “think of the children” when reviewing the constitutionality of government restrictions of controversial speech. But in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, 145 S. Ct. 2291 (2025), the Court abruptly changed course, jettisoning precedent, principle, and logic on the pretense of protecting children.