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Though the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect freedom of the press, for most of the history of the United States, the U.S. Supreme Court failed to use it to rule on libel cases. This left libel laws, based upon the traditional "Common Law" of defamation inherited from the English legal system, mixed across the states.
The Associated Press estimates that 95% of libel cases involving news stories do not arise from high-profile news stories, but "run of the mill" local stories like news coverage of local criminal investigations or trials, or business profiles. [62] An early example of libel is the case of John Peter Zenger in 1735.
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 ...
This term was adopted by the Supreme Court in its landmark 1964 ruling in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, [2] in which the Warren Court held that: . 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 ...
The Court narrowed the definition of libel with the case of Hustler Magazine v. Falwell made famous in the movie The People vs. Larry Flynt. New York Times Co. v. Sullivan established the actual malice standard, a high bar for public figure plaintiffs.
The legal burden of proof in defamation actions is thus higher in the case of a public figure than in the case of an ordinary person. Libel laws vary considerably on this matter from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Even within a cultural grouping, the libel laws of the UK are quite different from those in the US, for example.
The crime of scandalum magnatum (insulting the peers of the realm through slander or libel) [6] was established by the Statute of Westminster 1275, c. 34, [7] but the first instance of criminal libel is generally agreed to be the De Libellis Famosis case, [8] tried in the Star Chamber in the reign of James I by Edward Coke who, in his judgement ...
This case relied on the issue of actual malice, which involves the defendant making a statement known at the time to be false, or which was made with a "reckless disregard" of whether the statement was true or false. If "actual malice" cannot be shown, the defense of "fair comment" is then superseded by the broader protection of the failure by ...