The Supreme Court declined to hear Alan Dershowitz’s defamation appeal against, but two conservative justices used the denial to say the court should revisit the standard that let the network win. Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch wrote separately that the landmark rule from New York Times Co. v. Sullivan has no secure constitutional footing and should be reconsidered.
Dershowitz had argued that deceptively edited a snippet of his defense during Trump’s first impeachment trial, making it sound as if he had said the opposite of his fuller remarks about quid pro quo allegations. On Monday, he said the justices had effectively agreed the network lied about him, but the majority still made him prove actual malice by clear and convincing evidence, a burden he called impossible and one he expects to be overruled in years to come.
The case matters because Sullivan still controls defamation claims brought by public officials and public figures. Under that 1964 ruling, a plaintiff cannot win unless he shows the statement was made with actual malice, a standard Thomas and Gorsuch said bears no relation to the text, history or structure of the Constitution. They said the founding generation gave public figures stronger damage claims when they were defamed and pointed to the Sedition Act of 1798 as evidence that the early threshold for punishing false attacks on officials was lower than the modern rule.
That argument cuts against the result in Dershowitz’s own case. The court relied on the very standard Thomas and Gorsuch want to revisit when it refused to hear his appeal, leaving him without a new hearing even as the justices said the doctrine itself is flawed. The dissent also echoes Donald Trump’s long-running criticism of libel law, which resurfaced again on Sunday when he brought up his successful lawsuit against CBS News during an interview on 60 Minutes.
For now, the court has kept Sullivan in place and left its critics with only two votes. Dershowitz says harmed his reputation with an edited clip from the impeachment trial, but the bigger question is whether any future case will bring enough support inside the court to force a direct showdown with a libel rule that has shaped media litigation for six decades.
