Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment

By Anthony Lewis

A crucial and compelling account of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, the landmark Supreme Court case that redefined libel, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning legal journalist Anthony Lewis.

The First Amendment puts it this way: "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." Yet, in 1960, a city official in Montgomery, Alabama, sued The New York Times for libel—and was awarded $500,000 by a local jury—because the paper had published an ad critical of Montgomery's brutal response to civil rights protests.

The centuries of legal precedent behind the Sullivan case and the U.S. Supreme Court's historic reversal of the original verdict are expertly chronicled in this gripping and wonderfully readable book by the Pulitzer Prize Pulitzer Prize–winning legal journalist Anthony Lewis. It is our best account yet of a case that redefined what newspapers—and ordinary citizens—can print or say.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Apr 20, 2011
• ISBN: 9780307787828

Reviews for Make No Law

[carlym_35 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a fantastic book centered on the case of New York Times v. Sullivan, the libel action brought by a Montgomery, Alabama police commissioner (Sullivan) against the New York Times for printing a paid advertisement that did not mention Sullivan by name or position but talked about police actions against African-Americans and civil rights activists. Sullivan claimed that the ad defamed him because several minor details were wrong and because he was the head of the police force and therefore people would associate him with the ad. Before this case, the Supreme Court had not used the First Amendment to protect anyone against libel actions, but this case involved speech about public officials and a central political topic of the time. Lewis traces the history of First Amendment case law, which is very interesting; many people thought that the law protected only what Britain protected, which is a much narrower freedom than what we have today. Then Lewis goes into detail about the Sullivan case, including explaining the development of the arguments by the Times legal team, headed by Herbert Wechsler, and then the development of the Court opinion by Justice Brennan. He is able to use Court records and Justice Brennan's papers to show how the Court's reasoning took shape, something I found fascinating. Finally, Lewis discusses the impact of the Sullivan decision: it was a remarkable opinion that broadened protections for free speech, but in some ways it also caused libel litigation to be more expensive because of the standard the Court set. The Court found that public figures could only succeed on libel claims if they showed that the publisher was "reckless" in publishing something false, so that meant plaintiffs needed discovery about what the publisher knew and thought. Lewis explains other views on how best to achieve the goal of protecting speech without causing this problem, but no solution is perfect. My only quibble with him is that he praises judges who dismiss meritless libel claims on summary judgment because he says that it's not too expensive for defendants if the cases are dismissed at that stage rather than going to trial. While I agree that meritless claims should be dismissed at summary judgment, getting a case to that stage is expensive. I think it's a very academic view to say that it's inexpensive litigation if dismissed before trial; in reality, all the discovery work happens before summary judgment, and that can be extremely expensive. But I don't know what the answer is; only the most obviously false cases can be dismissed before all the facts are known. Anyway, it's a great book on an important topic, and it gave me a lot to think about.