Samantha Barbas’s Actual Malice: Civil Rights and Freedom of the Press in N.Y. Times v. Sullivan : Publication date, August 2024. UC Press. A fascinating case: Times v. Sullivan (1964) constitutionalized the law of libel. I'll review facts that will be familiar to the former law students among you: the Montgomery, Alabama police commissioner filed a lawsuit against the Times over an advertisement the Times had published that, the lawsuit claimed, harmed his reputation. The US Supreme Court said that criticism of public officials, even harsh criticism, and even that which may sometimes be erroneous, is integral to our system of ordered liberty. Such criticism is protected by the first amendment unless it is "published with knowing falsity or reckless disregard for the truth." Samantha Barbas has now written a new book about the case. Apparently, her chief slant is that implied by the subtitle: that the Sullivan case is generally perceived as a first-amendment case
I know someone who knows someone who just won a Nobel Prize! Just two degrees of separation! I won't name the intermediary link. But she is an old college friend of mine who married into the Ambros family. She thus became the in-law of a biologist named Victor Ambros [with no "e"], a professor at UMass Medical School. And Professor Ambros just won the Nobel Prize in medicine for work on microRNA. Allow me to bask in reflected glory. And here is a link should you want to know more about his work. U.S. Scientists Win Nobel Prize in Medicine for Discovery of mRNA (usnews.com) And a word to the ghost of Alfred Nobel. You're forgiven for that high-explosives thing.