Tea at Trianon: Limited-purpose Libel

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, July 19, 2026

Limited-purpose Libel

From Mark Judge at The New Criterion:

To understand the negative effects of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, the 1964 Supreme Court case that changed American libel laws, consider the example of David Enrich. An investigative reporter for The New York Times who participated in the paper’s smear campaign against Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, Enrich is the author of Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful (2025), a book that defends the press and, specifically, New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. Though Enrich has expressed regret for his own sloppy and malevolent reporting, it is protected by the very legal victories he celebrates in his own book.

The events of the case began in 1960 when The New York Times published a political advertisement critical of Southern opposition to desegregation that condemned the Montgomery police force but also contained inaccuracies. This led L. B. Sullivan, the Montgomery police commissioner, to sue the Times for libel. Sullivan prevailed in the trial court and won the appeal in the Supreme Court of Alabama. The Times then appealed to the Supreme Court. In an opinion authored by Justice William Brennan, the Court reversed the lower-court decisions: to be guilty of libel, a media outlet had to be guilty of “actual malice.”

Insight into the case is provided by Carson Holloway, a professor of political science at the University of Nebraska, in his new book No Liberty to Libel: The Constitutional Case Against New York Times v. Sullivan, published by Encounter Books. (Editor’s note: The New Criterion and Encounter Books are both published by Roger Kimball.) As Holloway describes it,

“Actual malice” here carried a specific, technical meaning—that the allegedly defamatory claims had been published with knowledge of their falsity, or at least with reckless disregard for their truth or falsity. To win damages in a libel action, the Court held, plaintiffs who were public officials would have to show not only that they had been defamed by a false publication, but also that the falsehood had been published knowingly or recklessly. This new standard gave the press (and others) what the Court believed was the constitutionally required breathing room to discuss vital public issues without undue fear of incurring large damage awards for erroneous publications—with the admitted side effect that some public officials who had actually suffered reputational damage from false reports would be unable to secure legal redress for their injuries.

In the years after Sullivan, Holloway notes, “additional rulings proceeded further down the trail blazed by the Sullivan Court, extending the ‘actual malice’ requirement to cases involving not only public officials but also ‘public figures.’” In 1967, the Supreme Court found in both Curtis Publishing Company v. Butts and Associated Press v. Walker that the actual-malice rule should apply not only to libel cases brought by public officials but also to those brought by all public figures—entertainers, professional athletes, musicians, business leaders, or university presidents. “Many who do not hold public office at the moment are nevertheless intimately involved in the resolution of important public questions,” Chief Justice Warren wrote in his decision on Curtis Publishing Company v. Butts. He continued, “our citizenry has a legitimate and substantial interest in the conduct of such persons, and freedom of the press to engage in uninhibited debate about their involvement in public issues and events is as crucial as it is in the case of ‘public officials.’” (Read more.)