morning everyone and welcome to week eight it's an important week because we'll be talking about libel law libel law when we think about prior restraints or subsequent punishments a libel suit would be about limit serious subsequent punishment that any of us would face in our careers and it affects all of the majors it's not just about journalism but of course journalists are more prone because their publications are often critical of people and there's people in government or celebrities that kind of thing but also I posted one of a very short reading and it's about trade libel and so what I wanted to emphasize to everybody was that especially our Stratcom majors there's a thing called trade libel and so if you say something negative about some company's product or service it could end up leading to a libel suit if what you said is not true and only if what you said is not true and I'll come back to that when I talk about the legal innovations one thing I want to emphasize and I put up a timeline in history from history calm and I encourage you to look at just browse through and remind yourself of some of the important events that happened during this era and a lot of what we're talking about with New York Times V Sullivan is directly related to the civil rights era and there are many many important cases as we'll see in on another video that our juror that grew out of the civil rights struggle but ended up expanding and strengthening First Amendment rights for all of us but so I just want to start by pointing out a breakthrough year in 64 65 that related to or that helps show the incredible changes that were going on in society and that led to changes in constitutional law in general and then led to changes in First Amendment law in particular and so we think about the First Amendment I mean the civil rights era starting in 1954 with the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v the Board of Education desegregating to schools and this ten year period then from 54 to 64 which I call civil rights era one part one that's the iconic period that you think of when you think about Martin Luther King leading the marches and the protests then you see the backlash you see the police viciously attacking the protesters all of those iconic images come from this era civil rights era one from 54 to 64 and so we see what King I asked you to watch the video about King because King it was a First Amendment genius and he truly understood the power of the First Amendment as a mechanism for participation and self-government and saw that the First Amendment was the key to doing that in two ways that ended up acting upon one another and that is using freedom of speech for in the press freedom of assembly peaceful protest as a way to drive social change and then the social change then ends up driving legal change but sometimes it could happen the other way around and changing the law like with brown V the Board of Education then drove social change so he understood that the First Amendment was the link that brought together or that helped this sort of dynamic relationship between social change and legal change right and so just to give some elevate and examples of innovations from that time the civil rights act of 1964 and it did the very same thing you may recall from an early timeline the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and a ban discrimination in public accommodations and that's a special term that relates to a private property that has been open to the public like a hotel a restaurant so back in 1875 Congress had banned discrimination in public accommodations then the Supreme Court struck that down as unconstitutional in the civil rights cases of 1883 which then halted a lot of progress that african-americans were making and so it wasn't until 1964 90 years later that Congress accomplishes that and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is not just about establishing protections for African Americans it affects all of us so for example there are sections of it that are very important in terms of protecting women from gender bias and gender discrimination so remember a lot of what we see the innovations coming out of the civil rights struggle ended up helping all of us 24th amendment it specifically banned poll taxes and then we see the companion legislation the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which swept away all of those Jim Crow era laws like for example literacy tests so these are all on our top if we did this as a timeline this would be the top timeline the general history timeline now let's drop down now we're on our 14th amendment time on here and we get a case called Reynolds V Sims it banned gerrymandering based on race gerrymandering is when you manipulate voting districts to try to influence the outcome of the election and so there was a long-standing practice in the south and not just in the south to be honest with you of manipulating the voting districts in order to quote-unquote dilute the black vote in other words draw the voting districts in such a way that african-americans will always be such a minority that they'll never be able to vote one of their own in and so therefore they will never really have fair representation that was in the news again a big case went to the Supreme Court just this past year and will be decided soon and it was about gerrymandering based on political party affiliation and so what people are hoping is that they'll create another companion case to Reynolds V Sims so that the two political parties and they both do it neither one is more guilty than the that they won't be able to manipulate the voting districts to create what are called safe seats right Malloy B Hogan is an incorporation case remember incorporation is the process by which the court incorporates parts of the Bill of Rights into the word Liberty in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in order to reach the state local level so what was happening was we had African Americans including like civil rights workers and protesters and they were being met with real violence when you look at that time line look at all of the violence that was happening and but they had no Fifth Amendment protection because we remember the v all of the first ten amendments in the Bill of Rights only apply at the federal level so the court needed to correct that problem and make the Fifth Amendment due process and also protection from self-incrimination apply at the state and local level and then finally New York Times V Sullivan and we're going to see more about that later when we talk about some first the First Amendment Revolution of the civil rights era in another video but we can say at this point just as a shorthand that it Americanize liable law and it had made American libel law in America is different from libel law in any other country in the world and New York Times V Sullivan made it much much harder to win a libel suit here in the United States and and in particular it made it very hard for public officials people in government to win a libel suit against the press so we'll dig down deeper into that in the next video