Source: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/404/898
Timestamp: 2019-04-23 20:08:43+00:00

Document:
It is clear that the First Amendment would proscribe any attempt to enact a federal libel law, notwithstanding the Alien and Sedition Act ( 1 Stat. 596) the contrary. 1 I do not suppose that anyone considered at the time of its adoption whether the Fourteenth Amendment meant that state courts could no longer participate in libel and slander awards. But I have expressed the idea before that 'constitutional law is not frozen as of a particular moment of time.' Rosenblatt v. Baer, 383 U.S. 75, 90, 86 S.Ct. 669, 15 L.Ed.2d 597 (1966). Thus, after it was settled in Stromberg v. California, 283 U.S. 359, 51 S.Ct. 532, 75 L.Ed. 1117 (1931), that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporated the First's freedoms of expression, it followed, in my view, that state libel laws were displaced by the same prohibition that had forbidden federal libel laws.
Finally, a factor which the New York Times majority failed to gauge properly was the interest of judicial administration in avoiding continuing readjustment of constitutional doctrine. On 16 occasions since and including that case this Court has attempted to clarify the appropriate balance from circumstance to circumstance. 4 The narrow focus on 'public officials' 5 broadened to include 'public figures' 6 and most recently has been expanded to statements of 'general or public interest.' 7 The latter, more blurred focus, as Justices Harlan, Marshall, and Stewart recently observed, will further require this Court to poll itself with increasing regularity to determine what events are of sufficient general or public interest to deserve protection. Rosenbloom v. Metromedia, Inc., 403 U.S. 29, 62, 81, 91 S.Ct. 1811 (1971). Thus in Time, Inc. v. Hill, 385 U.S. 374, 87 S.Ct. 534, 17 L.Ed.2d 456 (1967), an obscure family's captivity by escaped convicts propelled them into the 'public spotlight' and similarly in Rosenbloom v. Metromedia, Inc., 403 U.S. 29, 91 S.Ct. 1811 (1971), a majority felt that an arrest of a magazine salesman was sufficiently 'public' to endow a radio station with greater protection for an erroneous newscast that his arrest had been for selling obscene material. It is evident that this ad hoc approach has backed the Court into the same subjective quagmire which has trapped the judiciary in the obscenity cases.
Decisions subsequent to New York Times 8 have both tightened the actual malice test and expanded its displacement of the common law. The logical extension of these decisions should in time eliminate entirely libel and slander recoveries from American jurisprudence.
I am unpersuaded by the notion that because the petitioner's publications were commercial in nature they deserved less or no First Amendment protection. It is true that Valentine v. Chrestensen, 316 U.S. 52, 62 S.Ct. 920, 86 L.Ed. 1262 (1942), held that business advertisements and commercial matters fell outside sanctioned expression, but as I suggested in Cammarano v. United States, 358 U.S. 498, 513-515, 79 S.Ct. 524, 3 L.Ed.2d 462 (1959), that holding was ill-conceived and has not weathered subsequent scrutiny. Only two years after Valentine we held that a municipality could not apply its flat license tax to an evangelist who earned his livelihood by selling religious tracts door to door. Similarly, Burstyn Inc. v. Wilson, 343 U.S. 495, 499, 72 S.Ct. 777, 96 L.Ed. 1098 (1952), disposed of the view that because cinemas were profit enterprises their films were somehow deprived of full First Amendment status. And, in the field of libel we were unanimous in the New York Times case in rejecting the argument that because defamatory comment had been printed as an advertisement for profit it was less deserving of protection. New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 265-266, 84 S.Ct. 710 (1964). Surely we have eroded Valentine to the extent that it held a commercial form of publication negated the applicability of the First Amendment. Nor, in my view, should commercial content be controlling. The language of the First Amendment does not except speech directed at private economic decisionmaking. Certainly such speech could not be regarded as less important than political expression. When immersed in a free flow of commercial information, private sector decisionmaking is at least as effective an institution as are our various governments in furthering the social interest in obtaining the best general allocation of resources. 9 Baumol, Economic Theory and Operations Analysis, 249-256 (1961); Braff, Microeconomic Analysis, 259-276 (1969); Dorfman, Prices and Markets, 128-136 (3d ed. 1967).

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