Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, seen here during a CPAC conference in 2022, claims that The New York Times defamed her in a 2017 editorial. | LM Otero/AP
11/06/2023 03:25 PM EST
An attorney for former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin opened his argument for her at a federal appeals court Monday by mounting a frontal assault on the Supreme Court decision that has been the bedrock of U.S. libel law for nearly six decades, New York Times v. Sullivan.
“We think the times have changed so significantly since that rule was created by an unelected branch of our government 60 years ago, that it has no place in the modern speech landscape,” lawyer Shane Vogt said as he sought to revive a lawsuit Palin filed against the Times. The former Republican vice presidential nominee and reality television star claims that a 2017 editorial libeled her by unfairly linking her to the 2011 shooting rampage in Arizona that killed six people and left Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) badly wounded.
After a two-week jury trial in Manhattan last year, Palin lost her suit when U.S. District Court Judge Jed Rakoff ruled that there wasn’t any evidence to support her claim that the Times’ editorial writers intentionally published false claims about her.
Rakoff, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, allowed the jury to deliberate and it later returned a verdict for the Times, but the newspaper’s own news alerts about the judge’s decision tossing out the case reached some jurors on their cell...
A bevy of false claims flooded social media after Wednesday’s fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Kirk, 31, was gunned down while speaking at an event in Orem, Utah. Two days la...