The Supreme Court seems open to a Texas law aimed at blocking kids from seeing online pornography. But the justices could still send it back to a lower court for more consideration of how the age verification measure affects adults’ free-speech rights.

The Supreme Court weighed whether an explosion in online pornography requires repudiating the court’s precedents concerning sexual content as the justices Wednesday heard arguments in a challenge to Texas’s age-verification law for porn websites.

Invoking older examples of accessing pornographic materials, justices grappled with the constitutionality of a law that requires adults to input their age into explicit websites

A majority of the Supreme Court signaled Wednesday that Texas may be permitted to require some form of age verification for pornographic sites, but left open the possibility that deeper First Amendment questions may not be resolved immediately.

Thanks to the internet and smartphones, children today have instant access to vast amounts of online pornography, much of it graphic, violent and degrading, Texas state attorneys told the Supreme Court on Wednesday.

The law, meant to shield minors from sexual materials on the internet by requiring adults to prove they are 18, was challenged on First Amendment grounds.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday seemed open to upholding a Texas law requiring age verification for accessing pornography online, though the debate turned murkier on the standard of scrutiny that should be applied to it and similar laws in more than a dozen states.

The high court held a hearing about a Texas law that requires age verification to access sexual content online, in a legal challenge from the adult industry.

The justices heard arguments about whether they should uphold Texas' law requiring age verification to access online pornography.

U.S. Supreme Court justices expressed worries on Wednesday over the availability of online pornography to minors as they weighed the legality of a Texas law that requires pornographic websites to verify the age of users,