This week in the Supreme Court there was a CFR or call for response that could

challenge New York Times v. Sullivan. The landmark case that holds a public

official suing a news outlet for defamation or libel must show that the

organization knew that a statement was false or recklessly published the

information without investigating whether it was accurate. The plaintiff in the

case in question is coral Ridge Ministries. They're suing the Southern

Poverty Law Center for labeling them an anti-LGBT hate group and Amazon

Inc. for denying them access to Amazon smile where organizations can collect

donations from sales because of that hate group designation.

SPLC and Amazon asked the District Court to dismiss the case on the grounds

that coral Ridge Ministries hadn't alleged enough facts to show that SPLC acted

with actual malice as required by New York Times v. Sullivan. The District Court

agreed and dismissed the case. The dismissal was affirmed by a unanimous

panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and we'll get to that in a moment.

But why is this coming up now? Well, having failed to prove its case in the

lower courts, the ministry is now asking the Supreme Court to step in and

change the rules. Specifically, they're asking the court to overrule nearly

60 years worth of precedent built on New York Times v. Sullivan and to do

away with the actual malice standard entirely. Of course, people in

organizations filed petitions asking the high court to review lower court

decisions every day and very few of them are granted. But what makes this case

worth paying attention to is that this week we got a small sign that at least

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