The First Amendment and Civil Liability
In this book, First Amendment scholar Robert M. O'Neil confronts the new threats to free expression posed by civil liability suits brought against the media. Until very recently, publishers and media producers had assumed that - with a few exceptions such as libel - freedom of expression was absolute and protected from civil liability claims in the form of damage awards. In the late 1990s, these complacent assumptions were sharply challenged. The case of the Hit-Man Manual signaled the shift. After a hired assassin had been convicted of a brutal murder in a Washington, D.C., suburb, it was revealed that he had made use of a book that contained graphic, detailed instructions on how to carry out an execution. When the family of the victims sued the publisher for wrongful death, a federal appeals court ruled that the book was "not protected speech" since its apparent purpose was "to facilitate murder." A publisher was thus, for the very first time, potentially liable for criminal acts committed by a reader of one of its books. Later cases, especially a suit against Oliver Stone, producer of Natural Born Killers, have invoked this ruling in seeking to impose liability on those who create and distribute material that causes others to inflict injury or death.