02-20-2019, 10:02 PM
New York Times v. Sullivan was an awful decision. You can read it in full here: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/376/254/ Justice Hugo Black held in his concurrence that the decision did not go far enough, and that it should have made the press immune from government libel actions. But in doing so, he unintentionally hit on why the decision was awful when he said about the new standard that ""Malice," even as defined by the Court, is an elusive, abstract concept, hard to prove and hard to disprove." Thanks to this decision, we are using a standard for the First Amendment that is difficult to use, period.