Supreme Court seems ready to back Texas law limiting access to pornography

WASHINGTON — Several members of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority seemed deeply skeptical of a challenge to a Texas law that seeks to limit minors’ access to pornography, peppering a lawyer for the challengers with exceptionally hostile questions.

The lawyer, Derek L. Shaffer, said the law violated the First Amendment by requiring age-verification measures such as the submission of government-issued IDs that placed an unconstitutional burden on adults seeking to view sexually explicit materials. He said parents could protect their children by using content-filtering software.

Justice Samuel Alito was incredulous. “Do you know a lot of parents who are more tech savvy than their 15-year-old children?” He added that “there’s a huge volume of evidence that filtering doesn’t work.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who has seven children, said “kids can get online porn through gaming systems, tablets, phones, computers.”

She added, “Content filtering for all those different devices, I can say from personal experience, is difficult to keep up with.”

Much of the argument concerned whether the appeals court had erred in using a relaxed form of judicial scrutiny to block the law. Several justices indicated that a more demanding standard applied even as they suggested that the Texas law satisfied it.

That could set the stage for a ruling giving the challengers a short-term victory by returning the case to an appeals court for application of the stricter standard. But there was little doubt that the law would in the end be upheld.