What happened
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Alan Dershowitz's defamation case against Cable News Network, Inc., leaving in place his loss under the actual-malice standard while drawing a dissent from Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch.
In a short dissent from the denial of certiorari, Thomas said Dershowitz was treated as a public person and therefore had to prove not only common-law defamation elements but also actual malice, a standard the court created in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan.
Thomas wrote that Dershowitz asked the justices to overrule Sullivan and related precedents, and the dissent says Thomas and others have called for reconsidering the actual-malice standard for public figures.
The dissent repeated Thomas's criticism that the actual-malice standard for public figures "bears ‘no relation to the text, history, or structure of the Constitution.’" Thomas also said the founding generation believed public figures, if anything, had stronger damages claims when defamed.
The denial does not change defamation law or produce a merits holding, but the dissent keeps alive a recurring invitation for the court to revisit Sullivan's constitutional limits on public-figure defamation suits. Thomas ended by saying he would have granted certiorari to reconsider the standard in Dershowitz's case.