Epigraph: A freshening stream of libel actions, which often seem as much designed to punish writers and publications as to recover damages for real injuries, may threaten the public and constitutional interest in free, and frequently rough, discussion. —Judge Robert Bork, concurring opinion in Ollman v. Evans, 1984
New York Times Co. v. Sullivan
| The New York Times Co. v. Sullivan | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Argued January 6, 1964 Decided March 9, 1964 | |
| Full case name |
|
| Citations | 376 U.S. 254 (more) 84 S. Ct. 710; 11 L. Ed. 2d 686; 1964 U.S. LEXIS 1655; 95 A.L.R.2d 1412; 1 Media L. Rep. 1527 |
| Argument | Oral argument |
| Reargument | Reargument |
| Case history | |
| Prior | Judgment for plaintiff, Circuit Court, Montgomery County, Alabama; motion for new trial denied, Circuit Court, Montgomery County; affirmed, 144 So. 2d 25 (Ala. 1962); cert. granted, 371 U.S. 946 (1963). |
| Holding | |
| A newspaper cannot be held liable for making false defamatory statements about the official conduct of a public official unless the statements were made with actual malice. | |
| Court membership | |
| |
| Case opinions | |
| Majority | Brennan, joined by Warren, Clark, Harlan, Stewart, White |
| Concurrence | Black, joined by Douglas |
| Concurrence | Goldberg (in result), joined by Douglas |
| Laws applied | |
| U.S. Const. amends. I, XIV | |
New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964), was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that ruled the freedom of speech protections in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution limit the ability of a public official to sue for defamation.[1][2] The decision held that if a plaintiff in a defamation lawsuit is a public official or candidate for public office, then not only must they prove the normal elements of defamation—publication of a false defamatory statement to a third party—they must also prove that the statement was made with "actual malice", meaning the defendant either knew the statement was false or recklessly disregarded whether it might be false.[2] New York Times Co. v. Sullivan is frequently ranked as one of the greatest Supreme Court decisions of the modern era.[3]
The case began in 1960, when The New York Times published a full-page advertisement by supporters of Martin Luther King Jr. that criticized the police in Montgomery, Alabama, for their treatment of civil rights movement protesters.[2] The ad had several factual errors regarding the number of times King had been arrested during the protests, what song the protesters had sung, and whether students had been expelled for participating.[2] Based on the inaccuracies, Montgomery police commissioner L. B. Sullivan sued the Times for defamation in the local Alabama county court.[2] After the judge ruled that the advertisement's inaccuracies were defamatory per se, the jury returned a verdict in favor of Sullivan and awarded him $500,000 in damages.[2] The Times appealed first to the Supreme Court of Alabama, which affirmed the verdict, and then to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In March 1964, the Supreme Court unanimously held that the Alabama court's verdict violated the First Amendment.[1] The Court reasoned that defending the principle of wide-open debate will inevitably include "vehement, caustic, and... unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials." The Supreme Court's decision, and its adoption of the actual malice standard for defamation cases by public officials, reduced the financial exposure from potential defamation claims and frustrated efforts by public officials to use these claims to suppress political criticism.[4][5] The Supreme Court has since extended Sullivan's higher legal standard for defamation to all "public figures". This has made it extremely difficult for a public figure to win a defamation lawsuit in the United States. Read on for continued coverage of this important Ruling!
~~~
One evening in October 2021, a crowd gathered at the headquarters of the Heritage Foundation, in a modern, eight-story building a block away from the US Capitol. Within Washington’s network of conservative influence peddlers, Heritage, armed with nearly $400 million in assets,1 stood out as perhaps the most powerful, funneling personnel and ideas into Republican presidential administrations and congressional offices. This day, the foundation had devoted itself to a singular task: celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of Clarence Thomas’s ascent to the Supreme Court. Since 8:30 a.m., an all-star lineup of judges, lawyers, academics, and current and former federal officials had been paying tribute to the justice. The main event—when Thomas himself would finally take the stage—was scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Some two hundred people2 settled into their seats along the curved rows of a windowless auditorium. To kick off the evening program, the Heritage Foundation was debuting an annual prize:3 the Justice Clarence Thomas First Principles Award. The inaugural recipient was Larry Silberman. C. Boyden Gray, the former White House counsel who had advised George Bush to pick Thomas for the Supreme Court, had agreed to present the award to Silberman, whom he’d known for decades. Tall and thin, wearing a pinstriped suit and sneakers, Gray hunched over the lectern as he described Silberman’s legacy: He had been a loyal right-wing operative since the Nixon presidency. He had done much to advance the conservative legal movement during his years on the bench. But that was not his greatest claim to fame, at least not on this night, with Clarence and Ginni Thomas sitting in the front row. Silberman and his late wife, Ricky, had been by the Thomases’ sides ever since Clarence was at the EEOC. It was Silberman who had encouraged Thomas to become a judge. It was Silberman who had urged Gray to nominate Thomas to the Supreme Court.4 It was the Silbermans who had defended Thomas and disparaged Anita Hill. “Larry,” Gray rasped, “I will say this about you: No one has had more to do with Justice Thomas’s extraordinary journey than you, except possibly George H. W. Bush.” (Silberman, who would die less than a year later, told the audience that persuading Thomas to become a judge was “the single most important thing I’ve ever done.”) Before handing the eighty-six-year-old Silberman a large plaque, Gray remarked on just how inseparable the two judges had been. It wasn’t simply their long-standing friendship. Their legal philosophies were barely distinguishable, which in part reflected Silberman’s mentorship of Thomas as a neophyte judge. “I’ve often wondered whether they were secretly meeting every day over the last twenty or thirty years,” Gray said. “Because there’s a certain resonance. And there are many areas that deeply interest me, but one of the ones that gives me the most fun is their shared questions about New York Times v. Sullivan.” The audience erupted in appreciative laughter.5 It was more than a stray punch line. The conservative movement—including leading politicians, state and federal judges, and a tightly intertwined network of right-wing think tanks—had begun answering Thomas, Silberman, and Gorsuch’s calls to arms and taking up the quest to overturn Sullivan. Heritage had been among the first responders. Two years earlier, inspired by Thomas’s opinion in the McKee case, the foundation had hosted a lopsided debate in which two of the three participants—Libby Locke and a Heritage official—argued that Sullivan should be overturned. “Would it be the end of our democratic republic because the press would be out of business, and politicians and the powerful would no longer be held accountable?” Locke had asked, smirking. “No, hardly.” Why? Because “the media is largely owned by large, for-profit companies . . . who act in their own economic self-interest.”6 Indeed, that was what had happened in the early 1960s, when the New York Times, facing waves of litigation from L. B. Sullivan and others, had bowed to its economic self-interest and yanked its reporters out of Alabama. Here was a clue as to what an America without Sullivan might look like—especially at a time when some of the country’s democratic norms and traditions seemed up for grabs. Until the mid-1960s, the media’s appetite for aggressively pursuing the country’s richest and most powerful people, institutions, and industries had been constrained by, among other things, the realization that doing so might make newspapers and TV broadcasters vulnerable to disastrous damages. There was no particular reason to think that today would be any different. One only had to look to Britain—where the greater risk of litigation had led the media to collectively shy away from covering Lance Armstrong’s doping or wrongdoing by sundry Russian oligarchs and Saudi sheikhs, and had made London a destination of choice for libel tourists—to understand what might be in store for the United States. Large news organizations generally have financial resources and formidable in-house legal departments. But they also have owners, and—regardless of whether they are traditional public-company shareholders, shadowy hedge funds, or billionaires looking to wield influence—owners tend to care about the bottom line. That had been Locke’s point: financial incentives would instill discipline. But they also could instill fear. This wasn’t simply a matter of outlets paying a price for getting facts wrong. If the burden of proof rested once again with defendants—if it were up to them to prove that they had their facts right, as opposed to being up to plaintiffs to prove that the facts had been wrong—even entirely accurate articles could pose huge financial risks. For many news organizations, the safest bet would be to avoid doing anything to offend the richest and most powerful people, institutions, and industries. The calculus for smaller outlets and independent journalists would probably be even simpler. Purchasing libel insurance was already expensive. Without the built-in protections of Sullivan, it would become more so, since insurance companies set rates according to risk. For the countless news organizations operating on a financial knife’s edge, higher insurance prices would mean cutting back in other areas or perhaps foregoing insurance—a perilous roll of the dice. Regardless, their tolerance for taking risks was likely to shrink, which was good news for the local politicians, police chiefs, university presidents, businessmen, and countless others who might otherwise have found themselves under the microscope of their community newspaper. It was not hard to understand why Locke’s clients and Heritage’s wealthy donors might welcome a return to such an environment. (“If a small, independent media outlet is publishing a story that is accurate and newsworthy, then they don’t have anything to worry about,” Locke told me when I asked about this.) The Heritage Foundation’s media organ, the Daily Signal, amplified Thomas’s and Gorsuch’s critiques7 of Sullivan, filtering the argument through a nakedly partisan lens. A senior Heritage fellow argued that reversing the long-standing precedent might be the solution to “the outrageous lies and misrepresentations—especially about conservatives—that we see regularly on CNN, MSNBC, and other far-left media organizations.” The Federalist Society followed suit, hosting repeated events about overturning Sullivan. At one in Florida, a Clare Locke attorney named Jered Ede—the firm had recently hired him from Project Veritas, the group of conservative provocateurs, where he’d been general counsel—recycled the incorrect data8 (as well as the “ignorance is bliss” line) that Gorsuch had plucked from David Logan’s law review piece, claiming that 90 percent of jury awards in defamation cases were reversed on appeal. The result, Ede declared, is that the media has “virtually a zero percent chance of being found liable” in defamation cases. The right-wing Claremont Institute jumped in, too. It was backed by some of America’s richest families, including two—the Scaife and DeVos clans9—that had previously financed or threatened major libel lawsuits.10 In the 1980s, when Thomas was just starting at the EEOC, he had borrowed a pair of Claremont scholars to help him learn about the Constitution and figure out his personal politics.* Since then, the institute and the justice had operated in something approaching lockstep. By 1999, Claremont’s president, Larry Arnn, was hailing Thomas as “the supreme jurist in the land”11 when it came to promoting originalism.
Historian Jonathan Gienapp challenges originalist interpretations of the Constitution In his new book, Gienapp contends that present-day originalists have projected modern ideas onto historical texts, leading to a distorted interpretation of the Constitution that may not accurately reflect the Founders’ intentions.
When I read a nonfiction book, I make sure that I understand what is being said--and who is saying it--and then do my own research. (Do yours now with the two links above for further information.) It took me just one search to find the above discussion from a Stanford professor to gain a perspective that was logical--that made sense to me!
In discussing this book, I want to again reiterate my own personal political background. Up until I had retired, and specifically, in relation to the 2016 election, I was like many people, I spent my years on the job to learn more, hoping for advancement. I had learned about politics working as the name of Senator Byrd (WV) was often discussed on campus, but I rarely did much beyond knowing the basics of who was running... Now, it's one of those times in my life that I can say, "If I had only known..." I would have been much more involved. Have you had those same thoughts over the last decade or so?
In the last century, there was little thought to whether people told the TRUTH. If you were a religious family, that might have played an important part in deciding or, even, in learning not to lie, especially to our parents. It is easy for me, therefore, to be astonished with what the present administration is being permitted to do! Even to the astonishing Supreme Court statement that a president is immune from any action while in ofice...
Consider therefore, the excerpts regarding the "image" of Judge Thomas on that Supreme Court. First of all, if you are being considered for a Judge on that Court, wouldn't you be working to ensure that you do NOT develop a political point of view? But, rather, learn how to apply past law to specific cases and consider present and future ramifications?
Don't you just want to say--What BS! And wish that Ruth Bader Ginsburg was still alive? Certainly, the issue of Women's Health would never have changed with her on the Court! AND, don't you have a strange, disturbed question in your mind as to how the Supreme Court is now referred to as whether the judge is right or left?
*Consider this, why wouldn't you be working to ensure that your outside thoughts would be sufficiently subliminated so that you could be secure that you would be unbiased in sitting on the Supreme Court?! Yes we know that beginning when President Obama and continuing, the republican party as been working to ensure that as many judges of that party would be elected--even if they have questionable actions or qualifications?
Consider then, that Thomas barely was selected due to how an accusation against him was handle by the governmental representatives... And, that, the Head of the Senate refused to allow Obama to seat his last judge before leaving office... AND, that a credible accuser also testified about Kavanaugh and was known not to have received the normal background check before all republicans voted for his placement? AND, that this continued throughout the two Trump administrations, which, in fact, led to Project 2025 being the basis of the devastating actions now taking place against average Americans, in order to provide more tax cuts for the rich... We all know this--unless you are those who choose to blindly follow a political party without verifying exactly what they are all about... Or, that you also have a desire to move backward in America to the time when white men were the only ones who were permitted to handle political matters--and the money we all pay as taxes!!! Reminds me of the book written by the one woman who succeeded in her assault charge a few years ago...
 |
| https://gabixlerreviews-bookreadersheaven.blogspot.com/2024/02/what-do-we-need-men-for-modest-proposal.html So how did I get all the way back to Lies by DJT? And E. Jean Carroll's "win!" over his lies? Well, because the "Secret Campaign" now underway is about Defamation! and how it will be used to "attempt" to keep our mouths! shut from speaking TRUTH! Well, I hope you'll take the time to learn about the court case which they now want to get rid of just like they did Roe... And the questions "created" about the original plans of the writers of our Constitution... This discussion on Murder the Truth will continue for as long as I think is necessary to share with you... Here's the latest hot topic which is being attempted by the administration to keep teen sexual trafficking hidden by suing for defamation... with NO legal restrictions!? So, do you want to have TRUTH Murdered! - Watch for next post, Part 2 GABixlerReviews |
No comments:
Post a Comment