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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.
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.
False light privacy claims often arise under the same facts as defamation cases, and therefore not all states recognize false light actions. There is a subtle difference in the way courts view the legal theories—false light cases are about damage to a person's personal feelings or dignity, whereas defamation is about damage to a person's ...
For this reason, group libel cases are criminal even though most libel cases are civil torts. In a variety of Common Law jurisdictions, criminal laws prohibiting protests at funerals, sedition, false statements in connection with elections, and the use of profanity in public, are also often used in contexts similar to criminal libel actions ...
This term was adopted by the Supreme Court in its landmark 1964 ruling in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, [2] in which the Warren Court held that: . The constitutional guarantees require, we think, a Federal rule that prohibits a public official from recovering damages for a defamatory falsehood relating to his official conduct unless he proves that the statement was made with 'actual malice ...
The court denied the request, ruling it had jurisdiction. [36] A separate 2011 decision in Quebec Superior Court had ruled that Barrick Gold had to pay $143,000 to the book's three authors and publisher, Les Éditions Écosociété Inc., to prepare their defence in a "seemingly abusive" strategic lawsuit against public participation. [37]
The U.S. Supreme Court case Hustler v. Falwell involved an IIED claim brought by the evangelist Jerry Falwell against the publisher of Hustler Magazine for a parody ad that described Falwell as having lost his virginity to his mother in an outhouse. The Court ruled that the First Amendment protected such parodies of public figures from civil ...
Neutral reportage is a common law defense against libel and defamation lawsuits usually involving the media republishing unproven accusations about public figures. [1] It is a limited exception to the common law rule that one who repeats a defamatory statement is just as guilty as the first person who published it.