Near v. Minnesota

6 Key excerpts on "Near v. Minnesota"

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  Illustrated Great Decisions of the Supreme Court

  • Tony Mauro(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • CQ Press

    (Publisher)

  Minnesota can be viewed as the decision that breathed life into the press freedom clause of the First Amendment. Before Near, the press clause had rarely been tested and existed as a more theoretical than practical ideal. The Near decision for the first time accorded the press an exalted as well as a practical place in the constitutional landscape. The Court was saying that a critical, even an occasionally obnoxious, press plays a vital role in U.S. democracy, keeping government in check and keeping the electorate informed of things that officials would not themselves reveal. Near v. Minnesota, along with the 1964 decision in New York Times v. Sullivan, provided the legal cushion that helped embolden the press to take on its dominant role in modern society. (See New York Times v. Sullivan. ) The powerful legal influence of the Near decision was dra-matically demonstrated in 1971, when the New York Times began publication of the so-called Pentagon Papers, a secret government history of the Vietnam War. The Nixon administra-tion swiftly went to court to prevent the paper from printing later installments. Within two weeks, the dispute went before the Supreme Court. In a 6–3 decision that relied heavily on Near v. Minnesota, the Court said the government had not met the “heavy burden” of justifying prior restraint. (See New York Times Co. v. United States. ) NEW YORK TIMES CO. V. SULLIVAN 117 DECISION The First Amendment protects the media from libel suits for re-ports that defame public officials—even when those reports are false—unless it can be shown that the media organization acted with “actual malice.” Under that standard, to win money damages, the defamed official must prove that the reporter or organization knew the statement was false or recklessly did not care whether it was true or false. BACKGROUND During the early days of the civil rights movement, the white es-tablishment of the South viewed the northern press as an enemy.

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  Major Principles of Media Law

  2019 Edition

  • Wayne Overbeck, Genelle Belmas(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  In all of these diverse situations, there is one common element: a government agency or official is attempting to censor some kind of communication that is considered unacceptable—and that action raises First Amendment questions. In this chapter, we look at these and a few other forms of prior restraint. 64 Modern Prior Restraints PRIOR RESTRAINT FOUNDATIONS Near v. Minnesota A good place to begin any discussion of prior restraints is the landmark Supreme Court that resolved some of the most basic issues in this field of law. In the 1931 case of Near v. Minnesota ex rel. Olson (283 U.S. 697), the U.S. Supreme Court made it clear that prior restraints are generally improper in America. While there have been occasional prior restraints upheld by courts, the Near precedent remains a foundational precedent if the government tries to prevent the publication of newsworthy information by the media. The case resulted from a challenge to a Minnesota state statute that allowed government officials to treat a “malicious, scandalous and defamatory newspaper” as a public nuisance and forbid its publication. Under this law, a county attorney brought suit to shut down The Saturday Press, a small weekly newspaper produced by Howard Guilford and J. M. Near. Guilford and Near had published several articles critical of certain public officials over a period of two months. In their attacks, they charged that a gangster controlled gambling, bootlegging and racketeering in Minneapolis. They claimed law enforcement agencies did little to stop this corruption. In particular, they accused the police chief of gross neglect of duty, illicit relations with gangsters and participation in corruption. A trial court ruled the paper a public nuisance under the Minnesota law and banned its further publication. The Minnesota Supreme Court affirmed the ruling, and Near appealed to the U.S.

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  eBook - ePub

  Media Law and Ethics

  A Casebook

  • Roy L. Moore(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Prior Restraint Passage contains an image

  Near v. Minnesota Argued January 30, 1931Decided June 1, 1931283 U.S. 697, 51 S.Ct. 625, 75 L.Ed. 1357, 1 Med.L.Rptr. 1001

  Appeal from the Supreme Court of Minnesota

  Near v. Minnesota is generally considered the most significant prior restraint decision handed down by the Supreme Court. Today, when the Court deals with prior restraint cases, as it occasionally does, it consistently cites the holding in Near as controlling even though the case was decided by the narrowest of margins (5-4). The Court struck down as unconstitutional a state statute that allowed authorities to halt publication of “obscene, lewd and lascivious” or “malicious, scandalous and defamatory” publications as a public nuisance. The Court made it clear that prior restraint can be imposed in “exceptional cases,” but the opinion also noted that the chief purpose of the First Amendment was to prevent the evil of governmental prior restraint.

  Syllabus

  1. A Minnesota statute declares that one who engages “in the business of regularly and customarily producing, publishing,” etc., “a malicious, scandalous and defamatory newspaper, magazine or other periodical,” is guilty of a nuisance, and authorizes suits, in the name of the State, in which such periodicals may be abated and their publishers enjoined from future violations. In such a suit, malice may be inferred from the fact of publication. The defendant is permitted to prove, as a defense, that his publications were true and published “with good motives and for justifiable ends.” Disobedience of an injunction is punishable as a contempt. Held unconstitutional, as applied to publications charging neglect of duty and corruption upon the part of law-enforcing officers of the State. [ ]

  2. Liberty of the press is within the liberty safeguarded by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment from invasion by state action. [ ] 3. Liberty of the press is not an absolute right, and the State may punish its abuse. [ ] 4. In passing upon the constitutionality of the statute, the court has regard for substance, and not for form; the statute must be tested by its operation and effect. [ ]

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  Justice and the Media

  Reconciling Fair Trials and A Free Press

  • Matthew D. Bunker(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  As an alternate means to control prejudicial publicity, many courts have chosen to restrict the comments of trial participants through gag orders, rather than impose restrictions directly on the press. Those federal court decisions focusing on media challenges to gag orders on trial participants are sharply divided. Some courts have held that such gag orders cannot be classified as prior restraints at all, whereas others have treated such orders as functionally equivalent to prior restraints, and applied appropriately higher levels of scrutiny.

  Prior Restraint Doctrine in the Supreme Court

  In Near v. Minnesota,6 the landmark 20th-century prior restraint case, the Court struck down a Minnesota statute allowing courts to enjoin, as a public nuisance, a “malicious, scandalous and defamatory newspaper, magazine or other periodical.”7 The publication in question in Near was The Saturday Press, an anti-Semitic Minneapolis newspaper owned by Near. Near's newspaper routinely charged city officials with dereliction of duty and corruption. The trial court in Near issued a permanent injunction against Near's publication of The Saturday Press or any other publication “whatsoever which is a malicious, scandalous or defamatory newspaper. . . .”8

  6 283 U.S. 697 (1931).

  7 Id. at 701-702.

  8 Id. at 706.

  Chief Justice Hughes, writing for the Court, declared the statute unconstitutional under the First and Fourteenth Amendments. According to Hughes, the statute was an impermissible prior restraint because it allowed a publication to be completely suppressed. The Near majority did not assert that prior restraints were never constitutionally permissible; rather, Chief Justice Hughes, in dicta, noted some circumstances under which prior restraints might pass constitutional muster. These included publication of military information in wartime, obscenity, and incitement to overthrow government.9 The Near opinion did not set forth any test to measure when prior restraints might be constitutional. Hughes wrote that limitations on the “no prior restraint” rule would only apply in “exceptional cases.”10 The language of the opinion, however, seemed to suggest that prior restraints would be difficult to reconcile with free expression.

  9 Id. at 716.

  10 Id

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  Conscience, Expression, and Privacy

  The Supreme Court in American Society

  • Kermit L. Hall(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Near ruling complimented and possibly played a role in precipitating this further attack upon the use of certain types of controls that were designed to afford local officials authorization to use a type of power which otherwise would have been legally beyond their reach.

  Finally, the Near case, along with Stromberg v. California 267 was an attempt to move away, and move the country away, from the use of informal local controls to limit freedom of expression. Just as the majority condemned the ongoing use of the police power to restrict civil liberties, so it condemned a situation which made it possible for local officials, often acting at the behest of private local power, to selectively use their discretion in the law enforcement process to curtail expression that was distasteful or threatening to the local power establishment. While the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s quickly demonstrated that such controls could be swiftly revived and reinvigorated, the realistic recognition of their potential as devices to inhibit free expression by the Near court marked an important judicial acknowledgement of a process long overlooked by legal literalists.

  Justice Pierce Butler, a Minnesotan, wrote a strong dissenting opinion joined by Justices McReynolds, Sutherland, and Van Devanter. Butler began his dissent with the annoyed acknowledgement that “[t]he decision of the Court in this case declares Minnesota and every other State powerless to restrain by injunction the business of publishing and circulating among the people malicious, scandalous and defamatory periodicals that in due course of judicial procedure has been adjudged to be a public nuisance.”268 Butler stated that such a ruling “gives to freedom of the press a meaning and a scope not heretofore recognized and construes ‘liberty’ in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to put upon the States a federal restriction that is without precedent.”269 Clearly interested in protecting Minnesota’s respectable citizens from the possibility of abuse, he based most of his dissent upon the facts of the particular case, pointing out that Near did precisely what the law was intended to prevent, and that Near was, by his own admission, tainted with blackmail. He also quoted at length from the alleged malicious articles appearing in the Saturday Press .270

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  The Hughes Court: Volume 11

  From Progressivism to Pluralism, 1930 to 1941

  • Mark V. Tushnet(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  The Hughes Court and Radical Political Dissent 695 “forbid[ding] an innocent calling upon the ground that certain evils incident to the calling existed.” The law of nuisance had regularly been extended to “new condi- tions,” and that was all Minnesota’s legislature had done. 48 The state’s approach was ingenious, and held out some prospect for success. The Court’s conservatives might see the statute as a use of the state’s police powers to promote morals by prohibiting scandalous publications, and the Court’s liberals might see it as an ordinary business regulation of a sort they routinely voted to uphold. It was not to be. The Court’s liberals saw the case in light of their develop- ing account of constitutional limitations on the government’s power to deal with radical dissent. In Near, the majority treated the case as involving dissent with respect to local government, and radicalism in its scurrilousness: if the national government and state governments had to put up with Communists, surely Minneapolis’s political leaders could be required to put up with Near’s anti- Semitism. At the oral argument on January 30, 1931, Kirkland basically summarized his brief, although he appeared to concede, as the brief did not, that injunctions against publication might be permitted if “the evil sought to be remedied was of such paramount importance as to threaten the destruction of the state politically, morally, industrially or economically.” Near the end of Kirkland’s argument, Justice Pierce Butler suggested that private actions for defamation after publication might be inadequate because defendants like Near would rarely have the money to pay a judgment. Kirkland shifted attention from private damage actions to criminal prosecutions: an impecunious publisher who would not worry about being told to pay money would worry about going to jail. 49 James E. Markham, one of the deputies to Minnesota’s attorney general, ran into more difficulty in his argument.

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