⚖ Oral Arguments, with Context

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit hears a consolidated argument in a First Amendment challenge to Texas Senate Bill twenty four twenty, the App Store Accountability Act. The statute requires app stores to sort their Texas users into age categories when they create an account, and to obtain a verified parent's consent, separately each time, before a user under eighteen downloads an app, buys an app, or makes a purchase inside one. It also requires developers to give every app an age rating. It reaches apps of every kind, with narrow exceptions from the consent requirement for certain emergency services apps and for apps run by nonprofit standardized test administrators. Two suits challenge it: one by the Computer and Communications Industry Association, a trade group whose members include the major app stores, and one by Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, a student advocacy group, together with two Texas students who are minors. They argue the law sweeps in vast amounts of protected speech and violates the First Amendment. Texas defends the law as a content-neutral commercial regulation, one that empowers parents to control the contracts their children enter when downloading apps and the data privacy minors give up in those agreements. The core dispute is over the level of First Amendment scrutiny. The challengers say the law is content-based and must satisfy strict scrutiny. Texas says it regulates commercial transactions and is at most subject to intermediate scrutiny. In December twenty twenty-five the district court blocked the law, holding it likely violates the First Amendment, and Texas took this interlocutory appeal. A motions panel of the Fifth Circuit then put those injunctions on hold while the appeal goes forward, and in July the Supreme Court declined to vacate that stay. That was an emergency ruling, not a decision on whether the law is constitutional. So the App Store Accountability Act is in effect as this argument is heard.

Students v. Paxton (No. 25-51073) — U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, argued August 4, 2026.