Court Opinion

ID: 9426018
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:16:30.338031+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:58.645560
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Douglas,
concurring in the judgment.
I agree that the state judgment is “final,” and I also agree in the reversal of the Georgia court.* On the *501merits, the case for me is on all fours with New Jersey State Lottery Comm’n v. United States, 491 F. 2d 219 (CA3 1974), vacated and remanded, ante, p. 371. For the reasons I stated in my dissent from our disposition of that case, there is no power on the part of. government to suppress or penalize the publication of “news of the day.”

 While I join in the narrow result reached by the Court, I write separately to emphasize that I would ground that result upon a far broader proposition, namely, that the First Amendment, made applicable to the States through the Fourteenth, prohibits the use of state law “to impose damages for merely discussing public affairs New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U. S. 254, 295 (1964) (Black, J., concurring). See also Cantrell v. Forest City Publishing Co., 419 U.S. 245, 254 (1974) (Douglas, J., dissenting); Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U. S. 323, 355 (1974) (Douglas, J., dissenting) ; Time, Inc. v. Hill, 385 U. S. 374, 398 (1967) (Black, J., concurring) ; id., at 401 (Douglas, J., concurring); Garrison v. Louisiana, 379 U. S. 64, 80 (1964) (Douglas, J., concurring). In this context, of course, “public affairs” must be broadly construed— indeed, the term may be said to embrace “any matter of sufficient general interest to prompt media coverage . . . .” Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., supra, at 357 n. 6 (Douglas, J., dissenting). By its now-familiar process of balancing and accommodating First Amendment *501freedoms with state or individual interests, the Court raises a specter of liability which must inevitably induce self-censorship by the media, thereby inhibiting the rough-and-tumble discourse which the First Amendment so clearly protects.