Justices urged to stop Texas from enforcing age-verification and parental-consent law on apps

A student group and a trade association came to the Supreme Court on Monday afternoon on its interim docket, asking the justices to restore orders by a federal judge in Austin, Texas, that bar the state from enforcing a law that imposes age-verification and parental-consent requirements on minors’ access to apps and paid content within those apps. Half the states have similar age-verification requirements for minors.

The law at the center of the case is the Texas App Store Accountability Act, also known as SB 2420. A group known as Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, which says that its members “use mobile apps to teach other kids how to get involved in policymaking,” as well as two teenagers who use apps for art and journalism, went to federal court to challenge the law, which was scheduled to take effect on Jan. 1, 2026, as a violation of their First Amendment rights. The Computer and Communications Industry Association, a trade group that represents (among others) app stores and app developers, did the same.

In December 2025, U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman temporarily blocked the state from enforcing SB 2420. But on June 4, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit put Pitman’s orders on hold, prompting the challengers to come to the Supreme Court.

The students argued in the Supreme Court that the 5th Circuit’s decision “would render virtually the entire internet—not to mention the distribution of every book, newspaper, magazine, movie, or record album—‘commercial speech’ the government could more readily ban, restrict, edit, or compel. That is clearly wrong.” Moreover, they added, Texas already shields children from accessing adult content online; the law’s stated goal of protecting them “from ‘accessing harmful or inappropriate content’ … is not a valid government interest.”

The CCIA contended that the 5th Circuit’s decision “has upset the status quo by allowing the Act to be enforced for the first time, exposing app stores and millions of app developers to potential liability” and subjecting them to “enormous and unrecoverable compliance costs.” And in any event, it continued, the app stores that the CCIA’s members operate already “provide various, voluntary tools that enable parents to control their children’s exposure to apps and content.”

Justice Samuel Alito, who handles emergency applications from the 5th Circuit, instructed Texas to respond to the challengers’ filings by 4 p.m. EDT on Monday, June 22.