New York Times Co. v. Sullivan

Background

On March 29, 1960, The New York Times carried a full-page advertisement titled "Heed Their Rising Voices", paid for by the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King and the Struggle for Freedom in the South. In the advertisement, the Committee solicited funds to defend Martin Luther King Jr., against an Alabama perjury indictment. The advertisement described actions against civil rights protesters, some of them inaccurately, some of which involved the police force of Montgomery, Alabama. Referring to Alabama "official authority and police power", the advertisement stated: "They have arrested [King] seven times. ... ", whereas he had been arrested four times; and that "truckloads of police ... ringed the Alabama State College Campus" after the demonstration at the State Capitol, whereas the police had been "deployed near" the campus but had not actually "ringed" it and had not gone there in connection with the State Capitol demonstration. Although the Montgomery Public Safety commissioner, L. B. Sullivan, was not named in the advertisement, Sullivan argued that the inaccurate criticism of actions by the police was defamatory to him as well because it was his duty to supervise the police department.

Because Alabama law denied public officers recovery of punitive damages in a libel action on their official conduct unless they first made a written demand for a public retraction and the defendant failed or refused to comply, Sullivan sent such a request. The Times did not publish a retraction in response to the demand. Instead, its lawyers wrote a letter stating, among other things, that "we ... are somewhat puzzled as to how you think the statements in any way reflect on you," and "you might, if you desire, let us know in what respect you claim that the statements in the advertisement reflect on you."

Sullivan did not respond but instead filed a libel suit a few days later. He also sued four African-American ministers mentioned in the ad: Ralph Abernathy, S.S. Seay Sr., Fred Shuttlesworth, and Joseph Lowery.

The Times subsequently published a retraction of the advertisement upon the demand of Governor John Patterson of Alabama, who alleged the publication charged him with "grave misconduct and ... improper actions and omissions as Governor of Alabama and ex officio chairman of the State Board of Education of Alabama." When asked to explain why there had been a retraction for the Governor but not for Sullivan, the Secretary of the Times testified:

Decision

On March 9, 1964, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous 9–0 decision in favor of the Times that vacated the Alabama court's judgment and limited newspapers' liability for damages in defamation suits by public officials.

Opinion

Justice William J. Brennan Jr. authored the Court's opinion, joined by Chief Justice Earl Warren and Justices Tom C. Clark, John M. Harlan II, Potter Stewart, and Byron White. The Court began by explaining that the freedom to criticize public officials lay at the core of the freedom of speech and freedom of the press protected by the First Amendment.

The general proposition that freedom of expression upon public questions is secured by the First Amendment has long been settled by our decisions. The constitutional safeguard, we have said, "was fashioned to assure unfettered interchange of ideas for the bringing about of political and social changes desired by the people." ... "[I]t is a prized American privilege to speak one's mind, although not always with perfect taste, on all public institutions." ... The First Amendment, said Judge Learned Hand, "presupposes that right conclusions are more likely to be gathered out of a multitude of tongues, than through any kind of authoritative selection. To many, this is, and always will be, folly; but we have staked upon it our all."

The Court therefore concluded that it had to consider Sullivan's defamation claims "against the background of a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials."

With this background, the Court framed the case as turning on whether the United States' constitutional commitment to free speech required loosening the traditional common law rules for defamation.

The present advertisement, as an expression of grievance and protest on one of the major public issues of our time, would seem clearly to qualify for the constitutional protection. The question is whether it forfeits that protection by the falsity of some of its factual statements and by its alleged defamation of respondent.

In answer, the Court held that the First Amendment requires limiting the traditional common-law rules of defamation when a public official sues over false statements concerning his or her official conduct. The Court reasoned that "erroneous statement is inevitable in free debate, and ... must be protected if the freedoms of expression are to have the breathing space that they need ... to survive". It concluded that the importance of safeguarding the "breathing space" created by the First Amendment required giving constitutional protection to "erroneous statements honestly made". The Court analogized Alabama's libel law to the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts passed in the 1790s during the presidency of John Adams. It reasoned that a broad interpretation of libel laws that protected government officials from criticism would produce situations similar to those under the Alien and Sedition Acts, which had been historically criticized.

Concurrences

Justices Hugo Black and Arthur Goldberg wrote separate opinions concurring only in the judgment, meaning that they agreed that the Times should win but for different legal reasons than the Court gave. Justice William O. Douglas joined both concurrences.

International comparisons

The rule that somebody alleging defamation should have to prove untruth, rather than that the defendant should have to prove the truth of a statement, stood as a departure from the previous English common law. In England, the development was specifically rejected in Derbyshire County Council v. Times Newspapers Ltd and it was also rejected in Canada in Hill v. Church of Scientology of Toronto and more recently in Grant v. Torstar Corp. In Australia, the outcome of the case was followed in Theophanous v. The Herald & Weekly Times Ltd, but Theophanous was itself overruled by the High Court of Australia in Lange v Australian Broadcasting Corporation (1997) 189 CLR 520.

50th anniversary

In 2014, on the 50th anniversary of the ruling, The New York Times released an editorial in which it stated the background of the case, laid out the rationale for the Supreme Court decision, critically reflected on the state of freedom of the press 50 years after the ruling and compared the state of freedom of the press in the United States with other nations. The editorial board of The New York Times heralded the Sullivan decision not only as a ruling which "instantly changed libel law in the United States", but also as "the clearest and most forceful defense of press freedom in American history." The board added:

The ruling was revolutionary because the court for the first time rejected virtually any attempt to squelch criticism of public officials—even if false—as antithetical to "the central meaning of the First Amendment." Today, our understanding of freedom of the press comes in large part from the Sullivan case. Its core observations and principles remain unchallenged, even as the Internet has turned everyone into a worldwide publisher—capable of calling public officials instantly to account for their actions and also of ruining reputations with the click of a mouse.

In a 2015 Time magazine survey of over 50 law professors, both Owen Fiss (Yale) and Steven Shiffrin (Cornell) named New York Times v. Sullivan "the best Supreme Court decision since 1960", with Fiss noting that the decision helped cement "the free-speech traditions that have ensured the vibrancy of American democracy" and Schiffrin remarking that the case "overturned the censorial aspects of the law of libel and made it far easier in what’s left of our democracy for citizens—including the Fourth Estate—to criticize the powerful."

Later developments

Curtis Publishing Co. v. Butts, 388 U.S. 130 (1967) held that public figures who are not public officials may still sue news organizations if they disseminate information about them which is recklessly gathered and unchecked.

Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U.S. 323 (1974): Actual malice not necessary for defamation of private person if negligence is present.

Time, Inc. v. Hill, 385 U.S. 374 (1967). Extension of actual malice standard to false light invasion of privacy tort.

Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46 (1988): Extending standard to intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Milkovich v. Lorain Journal Co., 497 U.S. 1 (1990): Existing law is sufficient to protect free speech without recognizing opinion privilege against libel claims.

Further developments

The potential for reconsideration of Sullivan has been raised from the late 2000s to the early 2020s. In 2008, Rod Nachman, who had represented Sullivan before the Supreme Court, said that Sullivan and its progeny "have discouraged good people from running for office. The courts may have gone a little bit far for the First Amendment.” Leading into and during his first presidency from 2016 to 2020, Donald Trump called for changes in libel laws, taking issue with reporting from The New York Times and the content of Bob Woodward's book, Fear: Trump in the White House in 2018.

Trump's view was seconded by Justice Clarence Thomas in several opinions in Supreme Court cases. Thomas advocated reevaluating Sullivan in an opinion attached to the court's 2019 denial to hear a libel case brought by Katherine McKee, one of the women that accused entertainer Bill Cosby of sexual assault. McKee claimed Cosby had leaked a letter that permanently damaged her reputation. Lower courts rejected her case based on Sullivan, stating that she "thrust herself to the forefront of a public controversy", making her a limited public figure and requiring the higher standard of malice to be demonstrated. While Thomas wrote that the Court's decision to deny McKee's petition based on Sullivan was correct, he further wrote that Sullivan was wrongly decided, and that "if the Constitution does not require public figures to satisfy an actual-malice standard in state-law defamation suits, then neither should we". Thomas also repeated calls to review Sullivan in his dissent in Berisha v. Lawson in 2021 and in his dissent to the court's denial to hear Don Blankenship's appeal, in the latter saying that Sullivan allows news agencies to "cast false aspersions on public figures with near impunity". Justice Neil Gorsuch also joined in Thomas in Berisha in expressing his concerns of how the media landscape had changed since Sullivan.

Federal judge Laurence Silberman called on the Supreme Court to overturn New York Times v. Sullivan in a March 2021 opinion, stating that the New York Times and The Washington Post are "virtually Democratic Party broadsheets". Silberman's dissent also accused big tech companies of censoring conservatives and warned that "Democratic Party ideological control" of mainstream media may be a prelude to an "authoritarian or dictatorial regime" that constitutes "a threat to a viable democracy".

Las Vegas casino owner Steve Wynn filed defamation lawsuits against the Associated Press in 2018, claiming that articles published by the agency that contained allegations related to Wynn and sexual assault in the 1970s. Wynn argued that the Associated Press had met the standard of actual malice in its reporting. The Nevada courts dismissed Wynn's suit, arguing he had failed to show actual malice. Wynn subsequently petitioned the Supreme Court to hear his case in February 2025, asking them to overturn Sullivan's "actual malice" standard. The Supreme Court declined to grant certiorari to Wynn's case in March 2025.