Times v. Sullivan

50th anniversary

In a 2015 Time magazine survey of over 50 law professors, both Owen Fiss (Yale) and Steven Shiffrin (Cornell) named New York Times v. Sullivan "the best Supreme Court decision since 1960", with Fiss noting that the decision helped cement "the free-speech traditions that have ensured the vibrancy of American democracy" and Schiffrin remarking that the case "overturned the censorial aspects of the law of libel and made it far easier in what’s left of our democracy for citizens—including the Fourth Estate—to criticize the powerful."