okay so let's dig down a little bit deeper into New York Times V Sullivan and talk about why it was such a wizard evolution so libel laws very old kind of law we inherited libel law from English common law but there were a couple of things about it that always bothered us Americans and that was that it was so easy to win a libel suit against the press and so what we saw happening in the civil rights era was we saw the anti civil rights people trying to use the law as a weapon against the movement and so you saw in the short video clip of Martin Luther King that was from his mountaintop speech and you saw that he was angry and what he was angry about was some anti civil rights people using the law to stop the protests and stop the marches by getting injunctions and you remember an injunction is a kind of prior restraint and so he was angry he talks in the video about these illegal injunctions so that was one way another way was defamation law or libel law it's the same thing so what the anti civil rights people were doing was they were suing the northern papers like the New York Times for defamation of course all the New York Times was doing was reporting on what these the horrible things that were going on in itself like bombings of churches and lynchings and and all of the beatings and just horrible treatment of the civil rights protesters including murder well they were all white juries in these southern states and so the anti civil rights people were winning these lawsuits and the the amount of money that even the New York Times alone had racked up like hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines and the idea was to try to bankrupt the northern papers as a kind of punishment for reporting what was going on in the south and so the Supreme Court obviously could not let this continue to happen there's a legitimate use of libel law so they took this case and completely rewrote American libel law so that we can say at this point it's harder to win a libel suit in America than anywhere else in the world and it's because of this case and so that created incredibly strong shield for the press but remember this doesn't apply only to journalists right it applies to things that you put on Facebook or things that you write in a blog or anything that you write or publish or communicate to the public is covered by this it's not just professional journalism so the first thing that they did was they constitutionalized libel law libel law had always been a matter of common law that's law that accrues over time through court cases and statutory laws so for example all states have what is called a statute of limitations if you think somebody slandered you or liable you in North Carolina for example you have one year and if and if it's even more than a day or a day more than one year then your case is thrown out so we've got common law and statutory law common law operating at the state level this was never a federal issue these cases libel cases played out in state courts well the New York I mean the Supreme Court took this case and said no no no no no no we have to be involved because it involves First Amendment freedom of speech it was a very shocking and radical thing to do if you think about it because what they did was they took an entire era of law away from the state courts and they said no we federal courts and the Supreme Court we are now going to take we're gonna get involved in libel law so that was a big change finally you may remember all this edition acts that we had in 1798 and in 1861 and 1918 where the government made it a crime you criticized the government which seems kind of ridiculous so finally the New York Times I mean the Supreme Court weighed in on that and said you can't those are two contradictory ideas you cannot have the First Amendment protecting people's right to participate in self-government but then make it a crime to criticize government so the First Amendment not only gives us a right to criticize government the First Amendment actually expects us to it is it is every American's First Amendment or patriotic duty under the First Amendment to criticize the government when we feel that the government is doing wrong ended strict liability this is what in English law made it so easy to win a libel suit if you wrote it and it hurt this person's reputation you were liable right and there was no there was just no arguing about it and Americans had always long felt that that was not right because what if what you said or wrote was true then why should you be punished for speaking the truth and so the court said no liability without fault journalists have to have breathing room to make honest mistakes you know other people in other professions have breathing room to make honest mistakes and journalists need to have breathing room to make mistakes so no liability without falling and the person who is filing the libel suit against somebody it's on them to prove that the person was at fault all right so here is really where the rubber hit the road in distinguishing American libel law against English libel law and it created a public official category notice it's in question it means somebody who has a lot of power they work in government and the court felt like if government officials are going to go around filing lawsuits against their critics then it needs to be very hard for them to win and the way they made it very hard was they created the actual malice standard of fault so instead of strict liability the person has to prove actual and it's really hard to prove I wrote the definition in the class blog but I'll tell it to you again actual malice is knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth and so if a public official Sue's at the press or any critic anybody they have to prove this very high standard and so what the court essentially did was they raised the bar really high and they made it nearly impossible for a public official to win a libel suit against the press that's why people can go yet people can say horrible things about President Obama or horrible things about president Trump and these public officials aren't going to bother suing for libel because they know they won't win next cemented truth as an absolute defenseman we have been talking about this in America for about 200 years because we thought it just seemed the English system struck us as so strange that you would actually punish somebody even though what they said was true so the Supreme Court just locked it in so if you were ever to get sued for libel if you can show that what you said or wrote was true the case is over you win 100% of the time and then finally that Stratcom majors would be interested to know this case pointed the way toward Virginia Board of Pharmacy because the material that was that issue in this case as you'll see if you go on Wikipedia it didn't appear in a in an article written by a reporter and it didn't appear in a editorial written by the paper it was an ad that several of the African American ministers in the civil rights movement took out and it was calling on people to lift up their voices and or hear the hear the voices you know the cries for justice that were coming out of the south and so it was in an advertised and this was 1964 an advertisement wasn't advertising wasn't protected by the First Amendment so this case sort of anticipates Virginia Board of Pharmacy and leads the way and we'll talk more we'll get more in depth about some other innovations including New York Times V Sullivan that helped revolutionize First Amendment law during that era in the next video