The morning read for Tuesday, September 16

Each weekday, we select a short list of news articles and commentary related to the Supreme Court. Here’s the Tuesday morning read:

• TikTok Ban Averted as U.S. and China Reach ‘Framework’ of a Deal (Rebecca Schneid, Time) — U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced Monday that “a tentative deal” has been made between the U.S. and China that will “transfer the popular social media app TikTok to an American owner, just days before it was set to be blocked for an estimated 135 million users,” according to Time. Monday’s update is the latest twist in the legal battle over TikTok, which began last year when Congress passed and former President Joe Biden signed a law requiring TikTok to be banned in the U.S. “unless the company’s Chinese owner ByteDance sold to a U.S. buyer.” The Supreme Court upheld that law in January, but President Donald Trump later extended the time ByteDance had to make a sale until this Wednesday, Sept. 17.
• NY could force TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram to roll out age verification (Emma Roth, The Verge) — New York Attorney General Letitia James on Monday unveiled a state proposal that would require social media platforms “to confirm that someone is over 18 before allowing them to access an algorithm-driven feed or nighttime notifications,” according to The Verge. Such age verification laws are becoming more common across the country, but they’re prompting lawsuits over free speech and data privacy, including two cases that were in front of the Supreme Court in recent months. The justices allowed “age-gating on porn sites” in June in a case out of Texas and “at least temporarily” allowed Mississippi to impose age-based restrictions on social media sites in an emergency docket ruling last month.
• Prosecutors say they’ll ask US Supreme Court to restore conviction in Etan Patz missing child case (Associated Press) — In other New York news, New York City prosecutors have said “they will ask the Supreme Court to restore a murder conviction in the 1979 disappearance of 6-year-old Etan Patz after an appeals court overturned the verdict in July,” according to the Associated Press. They announced the decision in a Sunday filing with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit as they asked that court to delay sending the case of Pedro Hernandez, the man who in 2017 was convicted of killing Patz, back to a lower court for retrial until later this fall. Patz’s disappearance has been in the national spotlight for decades and is thought to have “contributed to an era of fear among American families, making anxious parents more protective of kids who had been allowed to roam and play unsupervised in their neighborhoods,” the AP reported.
• Public Schools Are Trampling Religious Liberty and Failing Our Kids (David Cortman, National Review) — During a meeting of the Presidential Religious Liberty Commission earlier this month, David Cortman spoke about standing with families “from the Supreme Court all the way to local school boards” as they challenged policies related to religious freedom in public schools. Cortman, who recently shared an excerpt from the speech in the National Review, contended that schools threaten religious liberty when they push “radical social agendas” in the curriculum and interpret the First Amendment’s establishment clause to mean that religious expression can’t happen on school grounds. “I read recently that only about one in three Americans know that freedom of religion is even in the First Amendment,” Cortman noted. “One way to accomplish changing this is to create training for school officials on what the Constitution actually says: not the ‘separation of church and state’ that has been weaponized to censor religion, but the robust freedom of religion for all, as intended by the Founders.”
• Listening to Justice Amy Coney Barrett (William Baude, Divided Argument) — If you’re still on the fence about whether to read Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s new memoir, you may want to check out William Baude’s review of it for the Divided Argument blog. Baude praised Barrett’s effort to clear up misconceptions about the court in “Listening to the Law,” and described it as “the single book I would most want to give to any lay person who wanted to understand the Court.” He continued, “I fear that this book will not get the reviews it deserves, because of the many things it does not do and does not try to do — provide juicy inside gossip about the Court; provide hope to liberals that Justice Barrett secretly shares their views; provide hope to conservatives that Justice Barrett is secretly ‘based.’ What it does do is give a great account, hopefully a canonical one, of the official story of our law in 2025.”