{"id":70,"date":"2015-06-01T22:12:11","date_gmt":"2015-06-01T22:12:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revolutionsincommunication.com\/law\/?page_id=70"},"modified":"2026-02-05T16:37:02","modified_gmt":"2026-02-05T16:37:02","slug":"libel-cases","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/revolutionsincommunication.com\/law\/libel\/libel-cases\/","title":{"rendered":"NY TIMES V SULLIVAN & RELATED CASES"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>In the years after World War II,<\/strong> as the Civil Rights movement <\/a>was emerging, the longstanding\u00a0 common law tolerance for fair comment and criticism was severely\u00a0 tested in two ways.<\/p>\n

First, before NY Times v Sullivan, libel suits were being\u00a0 filed to suppress criticism of the white\u00a0 establishment in the American South. In one typical example, South Carolina editor John Henry McCray was charged with criminal libel and forced to serve two months on a chain gang in 1954 for simply reporting the last words of a death-row inmate.<\/p>\n

Secondly, bigots and reactionaries attacked the news media for merely reporting about the Civil Rights movement, and libel suits were part of the attack.\u00a0 Eleven lawsuits had been filed against the New York Times, and another five against CBS, in the late 1950s and early 1960s.<\/p>\n

One of these lawsuits, brought by an Alabama police commissioner named Louis B. Sullivan,\u00a0 involved an advertisement defending Martin Luther King Jr and the civil rights movement.<\/p>\n

The Sullivan case is the most important in First Amendment jurisprudence because it struck down the many different state approaches to the First Amendment and created a national standard<\/em> that was unequivocal in its strong support for free speech and free press.<\/p>\n

Sullivan became the bedrock foundation for most modern social and political discussion in the US. \u00a0It is the<\/em><\/strong> crucial case in understanding how libel law is interpreted today in the US, and the standard to which the rest of the world\u00a0 aspires and from which dictators and tyrants recoil.<\/p>\n

The case involved a March, 1960 advertisement <\/a>placed in the New York Times by Alabama civil rights activists. It was headlined \u201cHeed their Rising Voices.\u201d (Text). <\/a>\u00a0The advertisement described resistance to the civil rights movement in the South, and had some minor inaccuracies. The police commissioner of Birmingham, Ala., Louis Sullivan, was not named in the ad, but he sued anyway under the state\u2019s libel law.<\/p>\n

Sullivan won the case in an Alabama state trial court. The New York Times appealed (which is why the case is labeled NY Times v Sullivan, not the other way around, as it was originally).\u00a0 Sullivan also won the first and second appeals brought by the New York Times in the Alabama courts.<\/p>\n

The New York Times then petitioned for certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court. It was granted, and the court heard<\/a>\u00a0 oral arguments in January, 1964.<\/p>\n

In its decision supporting the Times<\/a>, the U.S. Supreme Court held that:<\/p>\n

“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 public officials.\u201d<\/span> <\/strong><\/p>\n

For a public official to successfully sue for libel, he or she would have to prove \u201cactual malice.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

What is actual malice?<\/strong><\/p>\n