![]() In addition, the ad incorrectly said that local law enforcement officials “ringed” a local college campus the officers entered the campus but did not surround it.Īlabama, like most states at the time, recognized a doctrine of law known as “libel per se,” under which, if the Times was sued for libel, it was required to prove that the words in the advertisement were true “in all their particulars.” So if the Times could not verify every word, then the plaintiff could win unlimited damages. ![]() It described the song that protesters had sung on the state capitol steps as “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” when it was the national anthem, and it said that King had been arrested seven times, not four. The Montgomery officials had abetted and committed violence against the civil rights protesters.” Unfortunately a few details in the ad’s text were inaccurate. Barbas writes of the advertisement, “In its overall gist, of course, the statements were true. In that era, just 394 copies of the Times circulated in Alabama, but the ad drew the attention of local officials in Montgomery. It cost $4,800 but generated enough contributions for Rustin’s group to turn a nice profit for King’s defense. With the headline “Heed Their Rising Voices,” the ad ran on page 25 of the Times on March 29, 1960. Rustin listed several dozen endorsers of the message, mostly civil rights supporters from the North, but at the last minute he decided to add the names of twenty Black ministers from the South as well, though he had not asked them and they had no idea their names were being used. He gave some quick instructions to the playwright John Murray, who over six typewritten pages excoriated the Alabama officials for hounding King and abusing civil rights protesters. The civil rights leader Bayard Rustin took charge of it and decided to buy a full-page advertisement in the Times to attract donors. Later that year a group of King’s supporters met at Harry Belafonte’s apartment in New York to start a fundraising effort for King’s defense. Sullivan, the commissioner of public affairs, filed trumped-up charges of tax fraud and perjury against Dr. In 1960 the authorities in Montgomery, Alabama, including L.B. The story of Sullivan, and of the precedent’s possible demise, reveals as much about our own times as it does the 1960s. She appreciates the need for libel lawsuits at a time when “damaging falsehoods can spread online with a click, and reputations destroyed instantly.” But she recognizes that the protections of Sullivan are needed as much, or more, by individuals as by media companies. But Barbas’s endorsement of the Sullivan decision is more nuanced than those of Lewis and Edmondson, and more reflective of the current moment. It was, she writes, “one of a string of libel lawsuits brought by Southern segregationist officials against Northern media outlets…to prevent them from reporting on the civil rights movement.” By ruling for the Times, the Supreme Court “freed the press to cover the civil rights movement” and, not incidentally, likely saved the newspaper from being bankrupted by the damages it would have been ordered to pay in this and similar libel cases. Like the earlier authors, Barbas makes the reasonable claim that Sullivan represented a straightforward battle between good and evil. It’s a tale that has been told before-notably in books by Anthony Lewis and Aimee Edmondson *-but Barbas has a distinctive and relevant argument. Sullivan, Samantha Barbas, a professor at the University of Buffalo School of Law, tells the improbable story of the advertisement that gave rise to the case and the decision that Justice William J. In Actual Malice: Civil Rights and Freedom of the Press in New York Times v. It’s a fitting time, then, to take a fresh look at Sullivan-how it came about and what it means today. Such a change would have fundamental consequences for both those who speak and those who are spoken about. Wade to the dustbin of overruled precedents, may now target Sullivan for the same treatment. Murphy, a lawyer for Fox, likewise said that the principle governing the case “starts in Sullivan.” But the emboldened conservative majority on the Supreme Court, having dispatched Roe v. Smolla, one of the lawyers for Dominion, called Sullivan “the landmark decision that is the genesis for all of our modern First Amendment principles involving defamation law.” Erin E. In the last legal arguments before the jury was to be seated, Rodney A. ![]() In pretrial skirmishing, the two sides agreed on this much: the law of libel is governed by the Supreme Court’s 1964 decision in New York Times v. The libel lawsuit filed in March 2021 by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News, over the network’s coverage of claims that the company had rigged the 2020 election, was settled this spring, but the case may soon become an artifact of a vanished era.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |