In Which The NY ACLU Files A Killer Brief -- Slamming NY State Judge Wood, For Trying To Restrain / Censor NY Newspapers.

This just filed ACLU amicus brief is extremely well-argued. This reasoning will win the day, on appeal. New York state courts, at the appellate level, are very good.

You see, here in America, to protect us from what was 250 years ago (for over 700 years worth of oppression), governmental prior restraints on writing, scholarly thought, and the dissemination of ideas, among other ways -- in the press -- in most of what was then Western Europe... we adopted a First Amendment.

The amendment embodies, in just a handful of words, a bedrock of -- and touchstone to -- our shared notions of ordered liberty. The founders used just a few words, because they intended to covey that there should be essentially no prior restraints on a free press. [It intones "shall make no law. . ." and it means what it says, Judge Wood.]

. . .As an initial matter, the lower court erred in allowing its own views about what constitutes a matter of public concern to dictate the Times’ reporting. The Court of Appeals has long recognized that determining what constitutes a legitimate matter of public concern is primarily a job for editors. Judicial interference with the editorial judgment of newspapers abridges not only freedom of the press, but the right of the public to receive information and ideas. Although courts must occasionally review the press’s exercise of editorial judgment, that review is exceedingly deferential. It does not properly extend to the imposition of prior restraints on the press, which are particularly disfavored because they give courts unilateral authority to freeze public debate before appellate review has been exhausted. This grave judicial power should not be predicated on the public concern test’s open-ended legal standard, which gives too much room to individual judges’ subjective beliefs and biases. Both the New York State Constitution and the United States Constitution provide that the press and the public are the proper arbiters of whether and to what extent information is worthy of their concern, not the courts. . . .

The lower court’s misapplication of the public concern test demonstrates the danger of allowing courts to enjoin reporting on the basis of their own determinations about newsworthiness. Contrary to the court’s conclusion that attorney–client communications are categorically matters of private concern, the public may have an interest in reporting about documents and communications that are subject to attorney–client privilege. For example, the public undoubtedly had a strong interest in the Panama Papers leak, which involved the disclosure to the press of millions of attorney–client documents describing shady business dealings by prominent public figures and officials. The First Amendment fully protects the right to report on such documents, so long as they were lawfully obtained by the press outside the discovery process. [Ed. Note: The NYT avers that these were.] Any other conclusion would radically undermine the New York and United States Constitutions’ guarantees of press freedom and the public’s right to receive information.

Accordingly, this Court should vacate the lower court’s Decision and Order imposing a prior restraint against the Times’ reporting. . . .

Indeed -- and so -- now you know. Veritas will be on the hook for millions, to the NYT.

Onward, grinning. . . .

नमस्ते