1. Your basic assignment is to provide me a ten-page double spaced objective analysis of current defamation law, and a recommendation regarding whether the New York Times v. Sullivan standard should be replaced with a more up-to-date standard as advocated by the supplied dissents in Tah v. Global, Berisha v. Lawson, and Coral Ridge v. SPLC. The relevant parts of all these cases are provided for you. I also am requesting a recommendation regarding what that standard should be if you do recommend changes. Your recommendation should be written in the third person. Do not refer to me, or to you. You may go over the ten-page limit, but I probably will stop reading if you go overboard in length well beyond the ten-page limit. 2. A common concern is that the current standard for defamation in the United States for public figures is very restrictive. Under the 1964 case of New York Times v. Sullivan, to sustain a claim of defamation or libel, the First Amendment requires that the plaintiff show that the defendant knew that a statement was false or was reckless in deciding to publish the information without investigating whether it was accurate. This is called actual malice. This standard is a very high standard of proof, and it makes it virtually impossible for public figures to sue successfully even when the published information is false. The case is provided to you. 3. I have also provided relevant portions of Tah v. Global, Berisha v. Lawson, and Coral Ridge v. SPLC. These cases are very significant because the dissenting judges in each case make a strong critical analysis of the issues with the real-world ramifications of the New York Times v. Sullivan decision from 60 years ago. The majority judges in each of these cases applied the New York Times v. Sullivan standard to the cases in front of them. Nevertheless, the dissenting judges (who lost the vote in each case) urge the Supreme Court to change the old standard to reflect real-world conditions. Remember that when you discuss these cases the facts of the case dont matter much. The legal analysis that comes out of the case matters. Therefore, you should not spend precious page space on long discussions of what happened in these cases. Rather, you should focus on the legal discussions in the dissents. At some point a new defamation case will get to the Supreme Court and the Court will need to decide if the old standard is still appropriate. When they do, they will look at all these arguments.