New York Times Co. v. Sullivan

In March 1960, civil rights leaders take out a full-page ad in the New York Times titled "Heed Their Rising Voices." It describes police violence against student protesters in the South, and asks for donations to defend Martin Luther King Jr. from perjury charges in Alabama. The ad contains several factual errors. Dr. King had been arrested four times, not seven. The students had sung the National Anthem, not "My Country, Tis of Thee." L.B. Sullivan, an elected commissioner in Montgomery who supervised the city police, was not named in the ad. He sues the Times for libel anyway, and a Montgomery jury awards him five hundred thousand dollars.

The Times argues that no public discourse is possible if a public official can recover damages every time a critic gets a small fact wrong, and that southern courts are weaponizing libel law to drain the civil rights movement of resources and silence its allies. Sullivan argues that his professional reputation suffered real harm, that publishers have a duty to verify what they print, and that no one is above accountability for false statements.

If the Times wins, public officials must clear a near-impossible bar to win a libel claim, and the press operates with the breathing room it needs to scrutinize power. If Sullivan wins, every editor with limited resources thinks twice before printing criticism, and the cost of saying something true but imperfect could ruin a paper.