I like that because it illustrates there are two "rights" of citizens at stake here: 1) Freedom of Public Discourse; and 2) Justice for someone hurting a person's Reputation.
And these rights go together hand and glove. For slander is the unjust use of free Public Discourse to harm a Person or group.
Exhibits. . .
Other slanderers unchecked: Schiff, Pelosi, Schumer, Ford, NYTimes, Washington Post, CNN.
In Justice Thomas’s view, the First Amendment did nothing to limit the authority of states to protect the reputations of their citizens and leaders as they saw fit. When the First Amendment was ratified, he wrote, many states made it quite easy to sue for libel in civil actions and to prosecute libel as a crime. That was, he wrote, as it should be.Mark Steyn is emphatic that it’s too easy to sue for libel in Britain.“We did not begin meddling in this area until 1964, nearly 175 years after the First Amendment was ratified,” Justice Thomas wrote of the Sullivan decision. “The states are perfectly capable of striking an acceptable balance between encouraging robust public discourse and providing a meaningful remedy for reputational harm.” - Justice Thomas, quoted in the New York Times.
Imagine what a California legislature could do to FR, given a free hand! JimRob would be in jail!
And the problem would be nationwide, since web sites are
nationwide_worldwide_Jurisdiction shopping could be devastating to freedom of speech and press.
The country would IMHO be a lot better off with a libel law written by a Republican Congress. Democrats like Sullivan just as it is - nominally nonpartisan, actually devastatingly partisan against “conservatives.”