FINE POINTS OF LAW

In 2013, Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled it wasn’t necessarily illegal for teachers to send students sexually oriented text messages — that the state law banning the practice violated “free speech.” As a result, in February 2014, prosecutors in Tarrant County dropped their case against a junior-high teacher who’d exchanged 688 text messages with a 13-year-old female student over a six-day period in 2012, on topics such as “sexual preferences and fantasies” and whether either of them walked naked around the house. The messages would be illegal, the Court ruled, only if they led to a meeting or an offer of sex.