January 2, 2025

If you’ve studied First Amendment law, it’s impossible not to experience déjà vu while reading the briefs in Free Speech

If you’ve studied First Amendment law, it’s impossible not to experience déjà vu while reading the briefs in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, a Supreme Court case the justices will hear on January 15 about online pornography.

That’s because the Texas law at the heart of Free Speech Coalition is in all relevant respects identical to a federal law the Supreme Court blocked in Ashcroft v. ACLU (2004). (That federal law was meant to keep minors from being able to view pornography, and the Texas law attempts to do the same, albeit through a slightly different mechanism.) If the justices take seriously some of the more aggressive arguments Texas makes to defend its law, they could eliminate longstanding free speech protections for sexual content.

Source: The huge stakes in a new Supreme Court case about pornography

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