PORN LAW: When Your Kink Is Strict Scrutiny but the Court Only Goes Intermediate

Opening Arguments

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🗓️ 22 July 2025

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

OA1175 - How much of a restriction on your First Amendment rights is it to have to upload an ID to access an adult website? That is the question at the heart of Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, the Supreme Court’s recent review of age verification laws such as Texas’s HB 1181. Matt explains how this newly precedential application of intermediate scrutiny to these kinds of restrictions on adult content could have real implications for the future of other kinds of unpopular speech. Then for more context we welcome Zeve Sanderson, the Executive Director of the NYU Center for Social Media & Politics. Zeve and a team of other researchers have recently published the leading findings on the actual effects of age verification on browsing habits, which he takes us through while also explaining some possibly less-restrictive alternatives to current verification methods.

U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton (6/27/2025)
Audio of Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton SCOTUS oral arguments (1/15/2025)
Do Age Verification Bills Change Search Behavior? A Pre-Registered Registered Synthetic Control Multiverse, David Lang Benjamin Listyg† Brennah V. Ross‡ Anna V. Musquera Zeve Sanderson (March 2024)
Zeve Sanderson’s website

Transcript

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0:00.0	I think really all you need to know
0:01.9	is that Clarence Thomas wrote the majority.
0:03.5	Oh, God.
0:04.9	Yeah.
0:05.5	Quince Thomas himself, well-known porn fan, of course,
0:07.5	as we learned during the hearings.
0:21.7	For the justices, you should actually have to sit downstairs on Friday nights and watch some of this stuff. They had to, yeah.
0:22.5	They forced to.
0:24.2	Sorry, hon, late night at the old courthouse.
0:27.9	Down in the movie room.
0:28.8	We're all getting in robes, and we're going to...
0:31.6	Hello? Hello and welcome to opening arguments. This is episode 1175. I'm Thomas Smith. That over there is real life immigration attorney. Matt Cameron, how you doing? Hey, all right. Just hanging out. A couple guys talking about porn. Sure. Let's do it. No, we're starting the show now, Matt. Oh. Are you recording? Yeah. Okay. All right. That kid's okay. I can delete this first part. It's fine. Oh, cool. Okay. No, we're going to talk about porn law. Yeah. Yeah. First Amendment. It's always good when the government tries to do laws about stuff like that, I think. It always turns out just looking back
1:11.4	through history. Especially when it involves technology. Yeah. Usually the legislatures and the judiciary can be counted on to understand this tech pretty well, as we're going to see. So I'm going to talk about this Paxton v. Free Speech Coalition case that came down. We've got a whole bucket of Supreme Court cases. we can eat on this stuff for months, just talking about what the Supreme Court did this term.
1:09.6	But this is one we didn't get to talk about at all, so I wanted to get into it. And then We've got a whole bucket of Supreme Court cases. We can eat on this stuff for months, just talking about what the Supreme Court did this term. But this is one we didn't get to talk
1:29.5	about at all, so I wanted to get into it. And then we've got a great guest to help us understand the tech a little better. Yeah. Probably better than the justices ever did. Yeah, this is great, because we're going to talk about the law. And then we've got a great guest talking about, As you say, the tech and like sort of the practical effects of these laws a little bit.
1:27.5	Almost like an OASIO combo, you know?
1:29.9	We get like the tech and like sort of the practical effects of these laws a little bit.
1:44.5	It's almost like an OASIO combo, you know? We get like the law and some scholarship kind of thing.
1:49.8	Best of both worlds, I think. I can't wait. Yeah, it's a great guest, Steve Sanderson, doing some
1:53.4	amazing research on tech and policy, which I'd love to get more into that kind of stuff because
1:57.0	lawyers can't always understand it. Judges can't always understand it. And I think as we'll see, the legislature certainly can't.
2:01.2	So I'm plenty to talk about on this one.
	...

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