Near v. Minnesota and New York Times Co. v. United States

A Minnesota law passed in 1925 allowed a judge to shut down, as a “public nuisance,” any newspaper that regularly published “malicious, scandalous and defamatory” material. Once a court made that finding, it could order the publishers to stop putting out the paper.

In 1927, Jay Near and a partner published a weekly newspaper in Minneapolis called The Saturday Press. Its articles accused the city's police chief, mayor, and county attorney of ignoring or protecting gangsters who ran gambling and bootlegging operations, and they also attacked Jewish residents in hateful terms. The county attorney used the 1925 law to sue. A state court declared the paper a public nuisance and permanently barred Near from publishing it or any similar “malicious, scandalous or defamatory” newspaper, and the Minnesota Supreme Court upheld the order.

In a 5–4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the law, as used against Near, was unconstitutional. The majority held that freedom of the press is part of the liberty protected from state interference by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. It said that the chief purpose of the guarantee is to prevent “previous restraints” on publication, meaning government orders that stop something from being printed in the first place. Officials who believe a newspaper has falsely accused them can sue for libel after publication, the Court said, but the government can't suppress the newspaper in advance, except perhaps in rare situations such as publishing the locations of troops in wartime.