Defamation is the act of communicating to a third party false statements about a person, place, or thing that results in damage to its reputation. It can be spoken (slander) or written (libel). It constitutes a tort or a crime. The legal definition of defamation and related acts as well as the ways they are dealt with can vary greatly between countries and jurisdictions.
In United States law, actual malice is a legal requirement imposed upon public officials or public figures when they file suit for libel. Compared to other individuals who are less well known to the general public, public officials and public figures are held to a higher standard for what they must prove before they may succeed in a defamation lawsuit.
New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964), was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision ruling that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution's freedom of speech protections limit the ability of American public officials to sue for defamation. The decision held that if a plaintiff in a defamation lawsuit is a public official or candidate for public office, not only must they prove the normal elements of defamation—publication of a false defamatory statement to a third party—they must also prove that the statement was made with "actual malice", meaning the defendant either knew the statement was false or recklessly disregarded whether it might be false. New York Times Co. v. Sullivan is frequently ranked as one of the greatest Supreme Court decisions of the modern era.
Near v. Minnesota, 283 U.S. 697 (1931), was a landmark decision of the US Supreme Court under which prior restraint on publication was found to violate freedom of the press as protected under the First Amendment. This principle was applied to free speech generally in subsequent jurisprudence. The Court ruled that a Minnesota law that targeted publishers of "malicious" or "scandalous" newspapers violated the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Legal scholar and columnist Anthony Lewis called Near the Court's "first great press case".
Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U.S. 323 (1974), was a landmark decision of the US Supreme Court establishing the standard of First Amendment protection against defamation claims brought by private individuals. The Court held that, so long as they do not impose liability without fault, states are free to establish their own standards of liability for defamatory statements made about private individuals. However, the Court also ruled that if the state standard is lower than actual malice, the standard applying to public figures, then only actual damages may be awarded.
Milkovich v. Lorain Journal Co., 497 U.S. 1 (1990), was a United States Supreme Court case that rejected the argument that a separate opinion privilege existed against libel. It was seen by legal commentators as the end of an era that began with New York Times Co. v. Sullivan and continued with Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., in which the court clarified and greatly expanded the range and scope of what could be said in the press without fear of litigation.
Freedom of the press in the United States is legally protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
In the common law legal system, an expungement proceeding is a type of lawsuit in which an individual who has been arrested for or convicted of a crime seeks that the records of that earlier process be sealed or destroyed, making the records nonexistent or unavailable to the general public. If successful, the records are said to be "expunged". Black's Law Dictionary defines "expungement of record" as the "Process by which record of criminal conviction is destroyed or sealed from the state or Federal repository." While expungement deals with an underlying criminal record, it is a civil action in which the subject is the petitioner or plaintiff asking a court to declare that the records be expunged.
The origins of the United States' defamation laws pre-date the American Revolution; one influential case in 1734 involved John Peter Zenger and established precedent that "The Truth" is an absolute defense against charges of libel. Though the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect freedom of the press, for most of the history of the United States, the U.S. Supreme Court failed to use it to rule on libel cases. This left libel laws, based upon the traditional "Common Law" of defamation inherited from the English legal system, mixed across the states. The 1964 case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, however, radically changed the nature of libel law in the United States by establishing that public officials could win a suit for libel only when they could prove the media outlet in question knew either that the information was wholly and patently false or that it was published "with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not". Later Supreme Court cases barred strict liability for libel and forbade libel claims for statements that are so ridiculous as to be obviously facetious. Recent cases have added precedent on defamation law and the Internet.
Sergey Aleynikov is a former Goldman Sachs computer programmer. Between 2009 and 2016, he was prosecuted by NY Federal and State jurisdictions for the same conduct of allegedly copying proprietary computer source code from his employer, Goldman Sachs, before joining a competing firm. His first prosecution in federal court in New York ultimately resulted in acquittal by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The outcome of his second prosecution and trial in New York state court was a split verdict dismissed by court, which acquitted him on all counts. One count in that order of dismissal was later overturned by New York Court of Appeals, which took a very broad interpretation of the statute, and on recommendation of prosecutors he was sentenced to time served without punishment. The same New York Court of Appeals denied his petition to appeal on double jeopardy grounds. His story inspired Michael Lewis's bestseller Flash Boys.
The Libel Act 1843, commonly known as Lord Campbell's Libel Act, was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It enacted several important codifications of and modifications to the common law tort of libel.
Murphy v. Millennium Radio Group LLC is a 2011 U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals case concerning the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), copyright infringement, and defamation with regards to the online posting of a photocopy of a magazine photograph. After New Jersey radio station WKXW 101.5 copied onto its website a magazine picture of two of the station's talk show hosts, Craig Carton and Ray Rossi, the photographer of the picture, Peter Murphy, brought a suit against station owner Millennium Radio Group, as well as Carton and Rossi. The Third Circuit ruled that the station's actions did constitute both a violation of the DMCA and copyright infringement, which vacated the district court's judgment.
In the United States, some categories of speech are not protected by the First Amendment. According to the Supreme Court of the United States, the U.S. Constitution protects free speech while allowing limitations on certain categories of speech.
In United States constitutional law, false statements of fact are assertions, which are ostensibly facts, that are false. Such statements are not always protected by the First Amendment. Often, this is due to laws against defamation, that is making statements that harm the reputation of another. In those cases, freedom of speech comes into conflict with the right to privacy. Because it is almost impossible for someone to be absolutely sure that what they say is true, a party who makes a false claim isn't always liable. Whether such speech is protected depends on the situation. The standards of such protection have evolved over time from a body of Supreme Court rulings.
Obsidian Finance Group, LLC v. Cox is a 2011 case from the United States District Court for the District of Oregon concerning online defamation. Plaintiffs Obsidian Finance Group and its co-founder Kevin Padrick sued Crystal Cox for maintaining several blogs that accused Obsidian and Padrick of corrupt and fraudulent conduct. The court dismissed most of Cox's blog posts as opinion, but found one single post to be more factual in its assertions and therefore defamatory. For that post, the court awarded the plaintiffs $2.5 million in damages. This case is notable for the court's ruling that Cox, as an internet blogger, was not a journalist and was thus not protected by Oregon's media shield laws, although the court later clarified that its ruling did not categorically exclude blogs from being considered media and indicated that its decision was based in part upon Cox offering to remove negative posts for a $2,500 fee. In January 2014 the Ninth Circuit Court affirmed in part and reversed in part the district court's judgment awarding compensatory damages to the bankruptcy trustee. It also ordered a new trial on the blog post at issue.
Expungement in the United States is a process which varies across jurisdictions. Many states allow for criminal records to be sealed or expunged, although laws vary by state. Some states do not permit expungement, or allow expungement under very limited circumstances. In general, once sealed or expunged, all records of an arrest and of any subsequent court proceedings are removed from the public record, and the individual may legally deny or fail to acknowledge ever having been arrested for or charged with any crime which has been expunged.
Susan B. Anthony List v. Driehaus, 573 U.S. 149 (2014), is a United States Supreme Court case.
Missouri has two forms of expungement, one generally applicable to criminal cases and a unique one for the crime of being a minor in possession of alcohol. On July 13, 2016, governor Jay Nixon signed Senate Bill 588 into law, which expands the opportunities available for expungement of criminal convictions in Missouri. The new law went into effect January 1, 2018.
Rosenbloom v. Metromedia, Inc., 403 U.S. 29 (1971), was a United States Supreme Court case of libel brought by George Rosenbloom against Metromedia. This case was responsible for establishing the idea that the knowingly and recklessly false standard for defamatory statements should apply to private individuals as well as public officials in matters of public concern. Concluding that the story was a matter of public concern, the Supreme Court ruled that it did not matter that Rosenbloom was a private citizen; however, the evidence provided in the case did not support the damages awarded to Rosenbloom. The decision was made June 7, 1971 with a 5-3 decision.
Mckesson v. Doe, 592 U.S. __ (2020), was a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that temporarily halted a lawsuit by a police officer against an activist associated with the Black Lives Matter movement, and instructed the lower federal court to seek clarification of state law from the Louisiana Supreme Court. At issue was whether the activist, DeRay Mckesson, could be liable under Louisiana tort law for injuries caused by other people at a protest. Mckesson had argued that the First Amendment's protection of freedom of assembly should block the lawsuit entirely. The Court's decision to instead redirect the tort law issue to the Louisiana Supreme Court means that the constitutional question was delayed or avoided.
