Historian and UIowa Professor of Law Samantha Barbas will read from and talk about her book, Actual Malice: Civil Rights and Freedom of the Press in New York Times V. Sullivan. “Actual Malice…unfurls the story of the case (New York Times V. Sullivan) and reminds readers that the triumph of press freedom was an outgrowth of the civil-rights struggle. Versions of the story have been told before, perhaps most famously in Anthony Lewis’s “Make No Law” more than three decades ago. Yet Barbas deftly employs archival sources–notably from the Times, from the Martin Luther King, Jr., papers, and from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference–to shed new light. Her book illuminates the effect of libel suits on journalists’ ability to cover the movement, the legal strategies used against those suits, and the impact of the case on the civil-rights movement itself. A heroic narrative in which the litigation helped vanquish segregationists serves to underscore what Barbas calls the ‘centrality of freedom of speech to democracy.'”– “The New Yorker”

Samantha Barbas is Professor of Law and Aliber Family Chair at the University of Iowa College of Law. She is the author of seven books on mass media history and law. Her books have been reviewed or featured in The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, and CNN. Actual Malice was listed as one of the New Yorker’s Best Books of 2023. Barbas won a Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities for Actual Malice.