The Supreme Court Faces a Huge Test on Libel Law
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Next Friday, the United States Supreme Court is scheduled to meet to consider whether to hear appeals from two libel cases in which the plaintiffs seek to persuade the justices to reconsider the single greatest First Amendment victory for the press in American history.
Two of the court’s justices, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, already have expressed a readiness to do just that, a disturbing turn that could weaken speech protections and threaten the country’s free and robust press.
Their focus is the court’s unanimous 1964 decision in the case of New York Times v. Sullivan, won by the paper in the midst of the civil rights revolution. The purported libel appeared in a full-page advertisement in The Times titled “Heed Their Rising Voices,” which criticized a “wave of terror” against civil rights demonstrators in the South led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
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