Texas asks court to leave in place age-verification and parental-consent law on apps

On Monday afternoon, Texas urged the Supreme Court to leave in place an order by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit that allows the state to enforce 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 state’s solicitor general, William Peterson, emphasized that “the modern digital world is different” from the physical world, and that the law is required because, in the digital world, children can access “any conceivable content without parental consent or even parental knowledge.”

The Texas Legislature enacted the law at the center of the case, known as the App Store Accountability Act or SB 2420, last year. Before the law could go into effect on Jan. 1, 2026, it faced challenges in federal court in Austin, Texas, from two different sets of plaintiffs: 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; and the Computer and Communications Industry Association, a trade group that represents (among others) app stores and app developers.

In December 2025, U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman temporarily barred the state from enforcing the law. But on June 4, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit paused Pitman’s orders. It ruled that Pitman was likely wrong when he applied the most stringent constitutional test, known as strict scrutiny, to the law. “At most,” the court of appeals wrote, “SB2420 regulates speech that ‘proposes a commercial transaction,’ which is subject to intermediate scrutiny,” a less demanding standard. That test, the court of appeals explained, requires Texas to “establish a ‘reasonable fit’ between its goal and corresponding restrictions.” And Texas can do so, the court of appeals concluded: “Requiring age verification, parental consent, and app-related content ratings likely directly and materially advances Texas’s substantial interest in protecting children’s data, safety, and privacy in a digital world.”

The challengers last week asked the Supreme Court, on its interim docket, to reinstate Pitman’s orders. The students argued 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.” And the CCIA contended that the 5th Circuit’s decision subjects “app stores and millions of app developers to potential liability” and “enormous and unrecoverable compliance costs.”

In its brief on Monday, Texas echoed the 5th Circuit’s contention that Pitman had applied the wrong standard to determine that SB 2420 likely violates the First Amendment, using strict scrutiny when he should have used intermediate scrutiny. SB2420, the state continued, “readily survives” that test “because it serves the purpose of empowering parents to control their children’s upbringing by deciding which software applications their children should access and to which contractual terms their children should agree.”

Pitman’s orders are also barred, Texas added, by the Supreme Court’s 2025 ruling in Trump v. CASA, holding that so-called “nationwide” or “universal” injunctions likely exceed a district court’s power. The orders in this case, Texas stressed, “bar the Attorney General from enforcing S.B. 2420 against anyone, not just the” challengers, and therefore fall within the injunctions covered by CASA.

The challengers will have the opportunity to file replies to Texas’ brief. Once those are submitted, the court could act on their requests at any time.