Landmark Law Cases and American Society
eBook - ePub

Landmark Law Cases and American Society

Civil Rights, Libel Law, and the Free Press

  1. 232 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Landmark Law Cases and American Society

Civil Rights, Libel Law, and the Free Press

Book details
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

Illuminating a classic case from the turbulent civil rights era of the 1960s, two of America’s foremost legal historians—Kermit Hall and Melvin Urofsky—provide a compact and highly readable updating of one of the most memorable decisions in the Supreme Court’s canon.

When the New York Times published an advertisement that accused Alabama officials of willfully abusing civil rights activists, Montgomery police commissioner Lester Sullivan filed suit for defamation. Alabama courts, citing factual errors in the ad, ordered the Times to pay half a million dollars in damages. The Times appealed to the Supreme Court, which had previously deferred to the states on libel issues. The justices, recognizing that Alabama’s application of libel law threatened both the nation’s free press and equal rights for African Americans, unanimously sided with the Times.

As memorably recounted twenty years ago in Anthony Lewis’s Make No Law, the 1964 decision profoundly altered defamation law, which the Court declared must not hinder debate on public issues even if it includes “vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.” The decision also introduced a new First Amendment test: a public official cannot recover damages for libel unless he proves that the statement was made with the knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false.

Hall and Urofsky, however, place a new emphasis on this iconic case. Whereas Lewis’s book championed freedom of the press, the authors here provide a stronger focus on civil rights and southern legal culture. They convey to readers the urgency of the civil rights movement and the vitriolic anger it inspired in the Deep South. Their insights place this landmark case within a new and enlightening frame.

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Yes, you can access Landmark Law Cases and American Society by Kermit L. Hall,Melvin I. Urofsky in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & North American History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Year
2024
ISBN
9780700634538

Table of contents

  1. Front Cover
  2. Half Title
  3. Series Page
  4. Title Page
  5. Copyright Page
  6. Dedication
  7. Table of Contents
  8. Editors’ Preface
  9. Introduction
  10. 1. A Place in Time
  11. 2. “Lies, Lies, Lies”
  12. 3. Trial by Jury
  13. 4. “Let ’em See the Dogs Work”
  14. 5. The Road to the Alabama Supreme Court
  15. 6. A New Game Plan
  16. 7. Briefing the Court
  17. 8. “May It Please the Court”
  18. 9. “Uninhibited, Robust, and Wide-Open”
  19. 10. Libel Law after Sullivan
  20. 11. Coda: Civility and Reputation
  21. Chronology
  22. Bibliographical Essay
  23. Index
  24. Back Cover