Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch last summer signaled his willingness to revisit the landmark media-protection precedent New York Times v. Sullivan. It’s not clear, wrote the justice, “how well Sullivan and all its various extensions serve its intended goals in today’s changed world.” That made for two justices — including Clarence Thomas, an advocate for overturning Sullivan — gunning for a fresh look at the case. But in a recently released white paper on the debate over Sullivan, the nonprofit Media Law Resource Center stacked up refutations to the main planks of the Thomas-Gorsuch argument.
In the case, known as Brand X, the court sided with the Federal Communications Commission’s decision not to regulate broadband cable providers, rejecting a federal appeals court ruling that would have required regulation. “Although I authored Brand X, ‘it is never too late to surrender former views to a better considered position,’ ” Thomas wrote, borrowing language from Justice Robert Jackson in 1950. Thomas wrote a dissenting opinion Monday when the court declined to take on a case asking it to overrule the Brand X decision.
Justice Clarence Thomas on Tuesday called for the Supreme Court to reconsider New York Times v. Sullivan, the landmark 1964 ruling interpreting the First Amendment to make it hard for public officials to prevail in libel suits. He said the decision was the product of unprincipled “legal alchemy” that had no basis in the Constitution as understood by the people who drafted and ratified it.
