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A Culture Of Defamation Breeds A Culture Of Political Assassinations

More and more, Americans attack one another’s character and accuse each other of the most egregious crimes in order to win political battles.

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New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), once revered as a landmark First Amendment ruling, has become controversial in recent years. Leading political figures on the American right, such as President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, have lamented its influence on our public discourse. Leading jurists, such as Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, have called into question its constitutional legitimacy.

This is a welcome development. The Sullivan opinion and its famous “actual malice” doctrine never deserved their celebrated status. They are fruit of the Supreme Court’s most activist era, during which the justices routinely substituted their own policy preferences for the original meaning of the Constitution. 

Traditionally, all Americans could defend their reputations through libel law when falsehoods damaged them publicly. The Sullivan court changed this by introducing a two-tier system of libel law. Its “actual malice” standard applies only to public figures, requiring them to prove not only that defamatory claims were false, but that those who published them either knew they were false or recklessly disregarded the truth. In practice, this standard is extraordinarily difficult to meet, which is why public figures almost never prevail in libel suits, even when........

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