Look at me! Look at me! Nuisance lawsuit given that Rep. Gabbard is a public figure.
If smearing a public figure’s reputation is suit-worthy, the list of plaintiffs against Trump would be 30 blocks long.
Not so sure. The standard is knowing falsehood or reckless disregard for the truth. Maybe, just maybe. Perhaps at the very least this could be a case that results in SCOTUS reversing that abomination, New York Times v Sullivan. Getting rid of Sullivan would go a long way in restoring sanity in the media
Exactly. She is a public figure. Unfortunately, her lawsuit is stupid.
“Nuisance lawsuit given that Rep. Gabbard is a public figure.”
You can’t smear someone with lies even if he or she is a public figure.
Antonin Scalia pointed out that the (unanimous) Warren Court holding in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan that". . . libel can claim no talismanic immunity from constitutional limitations. It must be measured by standards that satisfy the First Amendment”is bogus.Justice Scalia pointed out that there was no bill of rights in the unamended Constitution because the Ninth and Tenth Amendments
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.andThe powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.were implicit in that document. And also because the rights of the people were nowhere comprehensively enumerated (courts are after all still sorting that out 2&frac2; centuries later) and to assay to do so in a noncontroversial way would have been a fool’s errand.Scalia added that the first eight amendments enumerate only those rights which historically had been abused by tyrants.
Scalia’s point was that freedom of speech and of the press already existed before the ratification of the First Amendment - and so did limitations such as laws against pornography. And, crucially, the wording of the First Amendment was crafted not to modify those limitations. That is what “the freedom of speech, or of the press” meant to the people who ratified the First Amendment. And nobody thought that the First Amendment modified libel law, from the Eighteenth Century all the way to the 1964 diktat of the Warren Court in Sullivan.
Sullivan blatantly violates the Ninth Amendment. Mr. Sullivan himself was not a Republican but a “Democrat.” The scare quotes signify that no present-day Democrat would associate with him, because he was a racist southern Democrat. But that nomenclature confusion aside, the reality is that Sullivan only affects conservatives - “liberals” don’t get libeled, for the simple reason that nobody whom the press is inclined to libel would ever be called “liberal” by the journalism cartel.