Five-minute digest
New York Times Co. v. Sullivan
Summary
On 29 March 1960 the New York Times printed 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, it described student demonstrations, accused unnamed Southern violators of meeting Dr. King's peaceful protests with intimidation, and asked for money. The names of four Alabama clergymen, Ralph D. Abernathy, Fred L. Shuttlesworth, S. S. Seay Sr. and J. E. Lowery, appeared among its supporters, though they testified that they had not authorized it. Several statements were inaccurate: the students at Alabama State College had sung the national anthem, not My Country, 'Tis of Thee; the dining hall had never been padlocked; and Dr. King had been arrested four times, not seven. L. B. Sullivan, the Montgomery city commissioner who supervised the police, was not named, but he sued the Times and the four ministers for libel, arguing that references to the police would be read as referring to him. An Alabama jury awarded him the full $500,000 he sought, and the Supreme Court of Alabama affirmed. Sullivan's side argued that the Constitution has never protected false and defamatory statements, that libel is a matter of state law in a private civil suit, and that a paid advertisement is commercial speech. The Times, represented by Herbert Wechsler, and the ministers answered that Alabama's rules, under which falsity and damage were presumed and the jury could tie criticism of a department to its head, would make any criticism of officials ruinously expensive. The Court reversed unanimously. Justice William J. Brennan Jr. first held that a state court's libel judgment is state action subject to the Fourteenth Amendment, and that an editorial advertisement on a matter of public concern is not commercial speech. He then placed the case against the background of a profound national commitment to debate on public issues that is uninhibited, robust and wide-open. Drawing on the controversy over the Sedition Act of 1798 and on Madison's view that the censorial power lies in the people over the government, he concluded that a public official may not recover damages for a defamatory falsehood about his official conduct unless he proves actual malice, meaning knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard of whether the statement was true. He found the record's evidence of malice unconvincing and its proof that the statements concerned Sullivan insufficient. Justice Hugo L. Black, joined by Justice William O. Douglas, concurred but would have gone further. He argued that the First and Fourteenth Amendments give an absolute, unconditional right to criticize public officials, since malice is an elusive concept and juries hostile to the press could find it whenever they wished. The library text gives Brennan's opinion in full and a substantial excerpt of Black's concurrence; Goldberg's concurrence and the footnotes are not included. Curtis Publishing Co. v. Butts (1967) extended the actual malice rule to public figures, and Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc. (1974) set a different standard for private persons.
Top Lessons
Breathing space for error
Brennan accepted that the advertisement contained mistakes, but argued that erroneous statements are inevitable in free debate and must be protected if speech is to have the breathing space it needs to survive. A rule punishing every error would silence true criticism along with false.
The lesson of 1798
Brennan drew on the Sedition Act of 1798, which punished false and malicious writings against the government, and on the protests of Jefferson and Madison. He concluded that the Act had been condemned in the court of history, and that its central meaning was that criticism of officials lies at the heart of the First Amendment.
Reputation and the right to criticize
Sullivan's lawyers defended an old principle: a man's good name deserves protection from falsehood. The Court balanced that principle against the citizen's freedom to criticize government and struck the balance in favour of criticism for public officials, unless the speaker knew or recklessly ignored the falsity.
How far does the First Amendment reach?
All nine Justices agreed on the result but not the reasoning. Black and Douglas argued for absolute protection of criticism of officials, warning that malice is easy for a hostile jury to find; the majority kept a narrow path for officials to recover.
Verified Quotes
Frequently cited
“Thus we consider this case 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.”
“Although the Sedition Act was never tested in this Court the attack upon its validity has carried the day in the court of history.”
“The right of free public discussion of the stewardship of public officials was thus, in Madison's view, a fundamental principle of the American form of government.”
Frequently cited
“The constitutional guarantees require, we think, a federal rule that prohibits a public official from recovering damages for a defamatory falsehood relating to his official conduct unless he proves that the statement was made with 'actual malice'—that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”
“The requirement that malice be proved provides at best an evanescent protection for the right critically to discuss public affairs and certainly does not measure up to the sturdy safeguard embodied in the First Amendment.”
“To punish the exercise of this right to discuss public affairs or to penalize it through libel judgments is to abridge or shut off discussion of the very kind most needed.”
Medical Lens
The opinions address libel, the press and the First Amendment; medical matters do not arise.