On September 15, 2026, Chief Judge Sheryl H. Lipman of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee denied the state attorney general's motion to dismiss the Free Speech Coalition's challenge to the Protect Tennessee Minors Act, allowing the case to proceed on every claim the plaintiffs brought. The docket entry is unambiguous: "ORDER DENYING 71 DEFENDANT'S MOTION TO DISMISS." XBIZ reported the ruling on September 16.

Why It Matters

Post-Paxton, the operative question for every adult platform, cam site, creator marketplace and sexual wellness retailer with a compliance budget is no longer *whether* states can impose age verification but *how far* they can go. Tennessee is now the venue where that line gets drawn, and the two provisions Lipman flagged as plausibly unconstitutional — hourly re-verification and seven-year retention of verification records — are precisely the operational requirements that make compliance expensive and the privacy exposure enormous. The Section 230 preemption argument surviving dismissal is the sleeper issue. If a federal court eventually holds that state AV laws cannot treat platforms as publishers of user-uploaded material, that reasoning collides directly with the wave of state statutes — including California's newly passed AB 1705 — built on exactly that premise. And the composition of the plaintiff group is a reminder that this is not a porn-industry problem in isolation: a mainstream sexual wellness retailer and a sex-education platform are co-plaintiffs, because "harmful to minors" definitions written loosely enough tend to sweep in the educational and retail end of the market too.

The procedural history matters more than usual here. The PTMA — Tennessee's age-verification statute for adult sites — was enacted in 2024, before the Supreme Court decided Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton. FSC and co-plaintiffs MelRose Michaels, sex-education platform O.school, sexual wellness retailer Adam & Eve and creator platform JustFor.Fans filed suit in November 2024 and won a temporary block, which the Sixth Circuit then lifted, putting the law into force. After the Supreme Court's June 2025 Paxton decision upheld Texas-style age verification under a lower standard of scrutiny, the industry's legal strategy shifted from "these laws are categorically unconstitutional" to "there are limits, and Tennessee blew past them." This is the first real test of that thesis.

FSC's amended complaint argues the PTMA fails even the intermediate scrutiny Paxton contemplates, that its vagueness violates 14th Amendment due process, and that treating site operators as publishers of third-party material conflicts with Section 230. Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti countered that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue him and had failed to state a plausible claim. Lipman rejected both arguments. She found it plausible that provisions such as the law's requirement to re-verify a user's age every 60 minutes impose a heightened burden on adults' access to protected speech, and plausible that a person of ordinary intelligence could not tell what the statute prohibits — singling out the definition of a covered site as one where a "substantial portion" (statutorily one-third) of material is harmful to minors, a standard she noted lets the state decide the question on an "excessively subjective" basis. "Plaintiffs plausibly allege that the PTMA as amended may substantially burden more speech than necessary," she wrote.

FSC counsel Jeff Sandman praised the "thorough, thoughtful, and reasoned decision." FSC board chair Jeffrey Douglas was blunter about what the ruling actually buys them: "Most importantly, the court ruled that we have 'standing,' the essential requirement in any federal lawsuit. Standing is an increasingly difficult hurdle to overcome in recent years, with conservative courts using it to block access to federal relief… None of our claims were dismissed by the court!" Lipman did not rule on the merits — the First Amendment question remains open.

Sources

Update — 2026-09-17

Initial entry — story first created.