The First Amendment guarantees freedom of the press. The Court has been a very strong opponent on any attempt to impose prior restraint on the press, i.e., stopping the publication of an article before it comes out. The first case to test this in the Supreme Court was the case of Near v. Minnesota (1931) . The issue was a Minnesota law banning “malicious, scandalous and defamatory”. While the Near was clearly malicious, scandalous and defamatory, the court ruled that prior restraint could only be applied in exceptional cases.
In 1971, in the case of United States v. New York Times, the Court ruled against the attempts of the US government to restrain the publishing of the Pentagon Papers. |
