Age Verification Lawsuits: What the Courts Have Decided So Far

By State of Surveillance Published: 2026-11-12 Last Updated: 2026-11-12

TL;DR

The Supreme Court has already answered the biggest question in this fight. On June 27, 2025 it upheld Texas's law requiring websites hosting material obscene to minors to check ages.[1] The vote was 6-3.[1] The standard it set is intermediate scrutiny, which most age-check laws aimed at sexual content will clear.[3] What is still being fought is everything else, especially app-store laws that reach past that category. And none of it decides what happens to the ID you handed over.

Someone wants your driver's licence to let you open a site. The real question is whether a court is about to stop that, or whether you should just plan around it. The honest answer in late 2026: the Supreme Court has already made most of this fight predictable, and left the part that matters to you unsettled.

What the Supreme Court Settled on June 27, 2025

The case was Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton, docketed as 23-1122, reported at 606 U.S. 461, and decided 6/27/25.[5] The Court granted the petition on July 2, 2024, and issued judgment on July 29, 2025.[2] Justice Thomas wrote the opinion, and the Court ruled 6-3, with Justice Kagan dissenting alongside Justices Sotomayor and Jackson.[1]

Texas HB 1181 is the law at issue. It requires commercial websites that distribute material more than one-third of which is "sexual material harmful to minors" to use age-verification methods to keep minors from reaching the site.[3]

The Court reasoned that the statute "does not directly regulate the protected speech of adults" because it "regulates only speech that is obscene to minors," and "[t]hat speech is unprotected to the extent the State seeks only to verify age."[3] Applying that standard, the law "readily satisfie[d]" the test: the statute "undoubtedly" advanced an important, "even 'compelling'" government interest in "shielding children from sexual content," and that it was "sufficiently tailored" because states "commonly" required age verification for "in-person access to sexual materials."[3]

One piece of Texas law never reached the Court. HB 1181 also compels covered sites to display a government-written warning: "[p]ornography is potentially biologically addictive, is proven to harm human brain development, desensitizes brain reward circuits, increases conditioned responses, and weakens brain function."[4] A district court held that provision violated the First Amendment, and that judgment on the health warnings was never appealed to the Supreme Court.[3]

What That Decision Left Open

The Court left a gap on purpose, and it is the gap your question falls into. It found it unnecessary to decide whether Texas's law requires covered sites to age-gate content other than "sexual material harmful to minors," leaving open the possibility that such a requirement might violate the First Amendment in particular applications.[3]

So lower courts now ask two questions: does the law regulate protected speech, unprotected speech, or a mix, and if a mix, does it directly regulate the protected speech or only burden it as a side effect.[3] Laws that restrict a whole app store make the second question hard.

For scale: "More than 20 states have passed laws requiring age verification for such content, and at least one bill introduced in the 119th Congress, the SCREEN Act, would do the same."[3]

The dissent is where the privacy argument got its best hearing. Justice Kagan argued that making adults hand over information about themselves and their viewing habits creates a deterrent, in First Amendment terms a "chilling effect" on speech.[3] The minority lost three to six, so the data point lives in the dissent, not the holding.

Where the Fight Moved: App Stores and Social Media

Texas's App Store Accountability Act reaches past the category the Supreme Court blessed. Senate Bill 2420 added Chapter 121 to the Texas Business and Commerce Code, and "This chapter may be cited as the App Store Accountability Act."[6] Under it, an app store must "use a commercially reasonable method of verification" to place a Texan who creates an account into an age category, and a "Minor" is "a child who is younger than 18 years of age who has not had the disabilities of minority removed for general purposes."[6]

Texas's attorney general says the bill was signed into law on May 27, 2025, and that the law "was subsequently blocked by a federal district judge in December 2025."[7] On June 4, 2026 the Fifth Circuit put the district court's orders on hold, ruling that the judge had applied the wrong test: strict scrutiny rather than intermediate scrutiny.[8] Texas asked the Supreme Court to leave that order in place, and on July 6, 2026 the Court turned the challengers down: "In a pair of brief, unsigned orders issued on Monday afternoon, the justices turned down requests to reinstate orders by a federal judge in Austin that barred the state from implementing the law."[9] There were "no public dissents from the orders."[9]

These were applications to vacate a stay, not rulings on the merits.[10][11] One application came from Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, the other from the Computer and Communications Industry Association.[8]

Not every state law survives this long. In Louisiana, the plaintiffs report that on December 15, 2025 the federal district court for the Middle District of Louisiana granted summary judgment, ruling the law violates the First Amendment and permanently blocking it.[12]

The Arguments That Are Actually Moving

Overbreadth is the one working theory, and it works by making the challenger prove too much. In one case a judge held that the challengers "manifestly failed to meet [their] overbreadth burden under" Moody v. NetChoice, because their record was too thin to measure the law's applications.[13] That cuts both ways: a law covering more than anyone has tested is likelier to fall, but a challenger who tests one corner can lose the whole case.

Parental-consent requirements are the second live front. A trial court preliminarily enjoined Mississippi's law, which requires parental consent before a minor creates a platform account. The Fifth Circuit stayed that injunction, and the Supreme Court declined to reverse the stay. Justice Kavanaugh, concurring in the denial, wrote that while the platforms had not met the stringent standard for interim relief, they had "demonstrated that they were likely to succeed on their First Amendment claims."[13] A justice saying a losing party will probably win is not a ruling, and it does not stop enforcement.

The federal level is filling up too. New York law prohibits covered platforms from providing an "addictive feed" to a user unless the platform has verified the user is not a covered minor or obtained parental consent.[13]

Where the Litigation Leaves You

Here is the part worth being blunt about. Every holding above is a First Amendment holding. They answer one question: may the state require this check? They do not answer what an age-check vendor may collect, how long it keeps your document, or who answers for it when it leaks. No ruling in this area is a privacy shield for the ID you already uploaded, and if your worry is the ID, that is your problem today.

Two more gaps. Where no one has sued, nothing happens: a law is only tested when a plaintiff with standing brings a challenge, and that has not happened in every state. And intermediate scrutiny is a deferential test, which is a low bar for a check that works.

So the honest advice is not "wait for the courts." The courts have told you roughly what they will do about the speech question. The privacy question is yours to manage.

What to Do This Week

  1. Work out which law is being used on you. A check for a site hosting material obscene to minors, an app-store age category, and a social-media age gate are three different statutes with different odds of surviving.
  2. Ask what the site is collecting, and pick the least data option on offer. Document upload, facial age estimation, and a third-party verifier are not the same privacy trade. See who checks your age online.
  3. Assume the check will be enforced. After July 6, 2026 Texas can enforce its app-store law while the case runs.[9]
  4. Do not treat a pending lawsuit as protection for you. The July 2026 orders were about who enforces the law right now, and they went against the challengers. Even a win on the merits will not undo checks people already completed.
  5. Keep a record of what you handed over: which site, which document or method, and when. If a law is later struck down, that record is the only way to learn what was collected.
  6. Shrink the rest of the surface. Age checks are one channel; your browser, your apps, and your phone leak more without any court involved. See browser privacy, app permissions, and phone spyware.

Related Reading

Sources

  1. SCOTUSblog: Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton (23-1122) (case page with the holding, vote, opinion author, dissent lineup and dates).
  2. Supreme Court of the United States: Docket No. 23-1122, Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton (official docket sheet).
  3. Congressional Research Service: Supreme Court Upholds State Age-Verification Requirement for Certain Websites, Legal Sidebar LSB11354 (28 August 2025).
  4. ACLU: Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton (case page on what Texas HB 1181 requires and the health-warning provision).
  5. Supreme Court of the United States: Opinions of the Court, October Term 2024 (official list of the Court's opinions with docket numbers, decision dates and United States Reports citations).
  6. Texas Legislature Online: 89(R) SB 2420, Enrolled version, Bill Text (new Chapter 121, Business & Commerce Code, App Store Accountability Act).
  7. Office of the Texas Attorney General: Attorney General Ken Paxton Secures Major Victory Protecting Children Online By Requiring Age Verification and Parental Approval for Minors' App Downloads (press release, 1 June 2026).
  8. SCOTUSblog: Texas asks court to leave in place age-verification and parental-consent law on apps (22 June 2026).
  9. SCOTUSblog: Supreme Court allows Texas to enforce law requiring age verification and parental consent on apps (6 July 2026).
  10. Supreme Court of the United States: Docket No. 25A1389, Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, et al. v. Ken Paxton, Attorney General of Texas (official interim docket sheet).
  11. Supreme Court of the United States: Docket No. 25A1390, Computer & Communications Industry Association v. Ken Paxton, Attorney General of Texas (official interim docket sheet).
  12. NetChoice: NetChoice v. Murrill (Louisiana) (case page; District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana, 15 December 2025).
  13. Congressional Research Service: First Amendment Challenges to Regulation of Social Media, report R49308 (24 August 2026).