Does Texas H.B. 1181, which requires commercial websites publishing sexually explicit content that is obscene to minors to verify visitors are 18 or older, violate the First Amendment's Free Speech Clause? Specifically, the Court must determine if this age-verification requirement constitutes an impermissible burden on the right of adults to access protected speech. The central issue is whether such a law triggers strict scrutiny, intermediate scrutiny, or rational-basis review.

• Adults possess a First Amendment right to access sexually explicit content that is not obscene for adults but may be obscene for minors.
• H.B. 1181 is a content-based restriction on protected speech and should therefore be subject to strict scrutiny.
• The law's requirements are overly burdensome and create a "chilling effect" due to privacy concerns and social stigma surrounding pornography.
• Texas could employ less restrictive means to protect children, such as encouraging parents to install content-filtering software on their devices.

• H.B. 1181 is a regulation of the distribution to minors of materials that are obscene for minors.
• Because minors have no First Amendment right to access such material, the law should be subject only to rational-basis review.
• The statute does not burden protected speech but merely ensures that users are adults before accessing content.
• Age verification is a necessary and traditional tool for enforcing age-based restrictions on sexual material in both physical and digital environments.

• The Court held that H.B. 1181 triggers intermediate scrutiny because it only incidentally burdens the protected speech of adults, rather than directly regulating it.
• The Court reasoned that States have a traditional power to prevent minors from accessing speech that is obscene from their perspective, as established in *Ginsberg v. New York*.
• Requiring proof of age is an "ordinary and appropriate means" of exercising this power, citing 1 J. Story, *Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States* § 430.
• The Court distinguished H.B. 1181 from cases like *Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union* and *Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union* because those laws acted as "blanket bans" that effectively suppressed speech for adults, whereas age verification is a modest burden.
• Applying the test from *Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. v. FCC* (*Turner II*), the Court found the law survives intermediate scrutiny if it "advances important governmental interests unrelated to the suppression of free speech and does not burden substantially more speech than necessary."
• The Court determined that Texas has an important interest in shielding children from sexual content and that H.B. 1181 is adequately tailored to this interest.
• The permitted verification methods—government-issued identification and transactional data—were deemed legitimate, established methods already used by other industries and some pornographic websites.
• The Court rejected the argument that Texas must use the "least restrictive means," noting that intermediate scrutiny does not require such a showing under *Ward v. Rock Against Racism*.
• The Court further noted that the law is not unconstitutionally underinclusive simply because it does not regulate search engines or social media, citing *TikTok Inc. v. Garland*.