SCOTUS Hearing Did Not Go Well for the Porn Industry

A Supreme Court hearing Wednesday on a Texas law designed to stop minors from accessing online pornography did not go well for the porn industry. In the court's first major First Amendment case involving pornography in more than 20 years, all six conservative justices and Justice Elena Kagan appeared to be willing to uphold the Texas age-verification law, Vox reports. Conservative justices were skeptical of arguments that parents could protect children with content filtering software, the New York Times reports. "Do you know a lot of parents who are more tech savvy than their 15-year-old children?" Justice Samuel Alito, a father of two, asked Derek Shaffer, a lawyer representing the porn industry.

"There's a huge volume of evidence that filtering doesn't work," Alito said. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a mother of seven, said "kids can get online porn through gaming systems, tablets, phones, computers," and "content filtering for all those different devices, I can say from personal experience, is difficult to keep up with." Pornhub is one of the parties challenging the Texas law. The Times reports that Alito used a "mocking tone" when he asked if the website was like the adult magazines the Supreme Court considered in earlier cases. "Is it like the old Playboy magazine?" he asked. "You have essays there by the modern-day equivalent of Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr.?"

Chief Justice John Roberts also appeared to believe that many precedents are obsolete. "Technological access to pornography, obviously, has exploded," he said, and "the nature of pornography, I think, has also changed." While the court appeared inclined to allow states to keep age-verification laws, some expressed concern that there could be a "spillover effect" for First Amendment rights, suggesting the case, Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, could be sent back to a lower court for consideration of how it affect adults' right, CNN reports. A ruling is expected by June. More than a dozen other states have laws similar to the Texas one, reports the AP. (Pornhub turned off its site in Texas after the law took effect.)