L. B. Sullivan, an elected commissioner in Montgomery who supervised the police department, sued The Times for defamation, even though he was not named in the advertisement. He sought $500,000 in damages, an amount equivalent to about $4 million today.

The lawsuit arose, his lawyers said, because of a wilful, deliberate and reckless attempt to portray in a full-page newspaper advertisement, for which the Times charged and was paid almost $5,000, rampant, vicious, terroristic and criminal police action in Montgomery, Alabama, to a nationwide public of 650,000.

Mr. Sullivan won his case in the Alabama courts but the matter wound up at the Supreme Court, where The Times and the free press generally won a stunning victory in 1964.

We consider this case against the background of a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wideopen, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials, the liberal Justice William J. Brennan Jr. wrote for the majority, which included Chief Justice Earl Warren.

The present advertisement, as an expression of grievance and protest on one of the major public issues of our time, would seem clearly to qualify for the constitutional protection, he continued. The question is whether it forfeits that protection by the falsity of some of its factual statements and by its alleged defamation of respondent.

Authoritative interpretations of the First Amendment guarantees have consistently refused to recognize an exception for any test of truth, whether administered by judges, juries or administrative officials and especially not one that puts the burden of providing truth on the speaker.

Justice Brennan noted that there is evidence that The Times published the advertisement without checking its accuracy against the news stories in The Timess own files.

But he went on to say, We think the evidence against The Times supports at most a finding of negligence in failing to discover the misstatements, and is constitutionally insufficient to show the recklessness that is required for a finding of actual malice.

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the publisher of The Times, welcomed the decision. The opinion of the Court makes freedom of the press more secure than ever before, he said.

He might well have said so. Heed Their Rising Voices may have paid greater dividends than any advertisement The Times has ever run.

Read more:

1964 | A Libel Suit Yields a Vigorous Defense of Free Speech - New York Times