WASHINGTON—The U.S. Supreme Court declined to halt the enforcement of Texas House Bill (HB) 1181, the state’s controversial age verification law, during a petition for writ of certiorari still being considered by the high court pertaining to a lawsuit brought by a plaintiff class of adult entertainment industry stakeholders.
No explanation was given for the denial of the motion to stay enforcement, nor was there any dissent filed by any members of the conservative-leaning nine-member court. Represented by a team of attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union and Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, the plaintiffs contend that allowing the continued enforcement of HB 1181 during the appeal would violate their First Amendment rights.
Adult industry trade group the Free Speech Coalition and the parent companies of some of the largest adult entertainment websites in the world filed suit against Texas in a federal district court to block HB 1181. Senior U.S. District Judge David Alan Ezra of the Western District of Texas initially ordered the blockage of the law on grounds it violated the First Amendment.
Texas appealed Ezra’s ruling initially blocking the law during litigation to the notoriously conservative U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. In a split decision, 2-1, the Fifth Circuit sided with Texas and declared the age verification requirements in HB 1181 constitutional.
Free Speech Coalition director of public affairs Mike Stabile made the following statement to AVN: "While the Supreme Court has denied our application to stay the Fifth Circuit’s decision upholding age verification requirements in Texas, our petition for full merits review before the Supreme Court remains pending. We look forward to continuing this challenge, and others like it, in the federal courts. The ruling by the Fifth Circuit remains in direct opposition to decades of Supreme Court precedent, and we remain hopeful that the Supreme Court will grant our petition for certiorari and reaffirm its lengthy line of cases applying strict scrutiny to content-based restrictions on speech like those in the Texas statute we’ve challenged. We will continue to fight for the right to access the internet without intrusive government oversight."
