Cox Broadcasting Corp. v. Cohn
The Supreme Court ruled that a Georgia father could not collect damages from a TV station for broadcasting the name of his deceased daughter, a rape victim, because the reporter had lawfully obtained her name from open court records during a public prosecution.
The decision means states cannot punish the press for accurately reporting information that is already sitting in public court files, sharply limiting how far privacy lawsuits can reach when the press relies on official records.
“At the very least, the First and Fourteenth Amendments will not allow exposing the press to liability for truthfully publishing information released to the public in official court records.”
The core holding limiting privacy liability for reporting information from public court records.
How it got here: A Georgia trial court granted summary judgment for the father on liability; the Georgia Supreme Court upheld the privacy claim and the statute's constitutionality, and the broadcaster appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Case in Depth
What happened
A 17-year-old girl was raped and killed in Georgia; six young men were charged. A television reporter learned her name from indictments he examined in open court and broadcast it. Georgia law made publishing a rape victim's name a misdemeanor, and the victim's father sued the broadcaster and reporter for invading his own privacy by disclosing his daughter's identity.
The question before the Court
Could a state let a grieving father sue a TV station for broadcasting his deceased daughter's name as a rape victim, when a reporter got that name straight from public court records?
Why it matters
News organizations that report information drawn from public court records — including victims' names in criminal cases — are now shielded from privacy lawsuits over that reporting. States that want to protect victim privacy must do so by keeping records confidential in the first place, not by punishing the press after the fact for repeating what officials already made public.
What changes now
The Georgia Supreme Court's judgment against the broadcaster is undone, and the father's privacy claim cannot go forward on the theory the state used. The ruling is a final decision on the First Amendment question, though the Court expressly left open broader questions, such as whether the press could ever be held liable for publishing private information obtained by means other than public records, or whether truth is always a complete defense in private-figure defamation suits.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether the press could be held liable for publishing truthful private information obtained through means other than public records, nor whether privacy actions in general are constitutional. It also left open whether truth must be a complete defense in defamation suits brought by private individuals, and whether states may restrict public access to court records in the first place.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Powell
Justice Powell agreed with the Court's holding but wrote separately because he read the Court's recent Gertz decision as already resolving the open question of whether truth must be a defense in private-citizen defamation suits. He argued that Gertz's fault-based standard for defamatory falsehood implicitly requires that a defense of truth be available whenever the statements at issue are, in fact, true.
Concurrence — Justice Douglas
Justice Douglas agreed the judgment was final and agreed with reversing the Georgia court, but he would have grounded the decision on a much broader principle: that the First Amendment bars any state law penalty for merely discussing public affairs, a category he said should be broadly construed to include any matter of general interest to the media.
Dissent — Justice Rehnquist
“the Court's holding today enunciates a virtually formless exception to the finality requirement, one which differs in kind from those previously carved out.”Rehnquist's objection that the majority's jurisdictional test lacked clear limits.
Justice Rehnquist argued the Court lacked jurisdiction because the Georgia Supreme Court's decision was not truly final, since a jury trial on damages still had not occurred. He warned that the majority's new 'pragmatic' finality test was formless, would improperly draw the Court into assessing case merits just to decide jurisdiction, and would undermine the traditional caution against deciding constitutional questions before absolutely necessary.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court first resolved a threshold jurisdictional question, holding that the Georgia Supreme Court's rejection of the First Amendment defense counted as a final judgment even though a jury trial on damages remained, because delaying review would leave the press operating under an unsettled and doubtful constitutional rule.
- Turning to the merits, the Court weighed the state's interest in protecting personal privacy against the press's role in reporting on government and judicial proceedings, noting that the press serves as the public's main source of information about how courts and prosecutions operate.
- The Court identified a narrow question: whether a state may penalize the press for accurately publishing a name that was already placed on public record by the government itself, through court documents open to public inspection.
- Relying on the developing law of privacy torts, which generally recognizes no liability for republishing facts already found in public records, the Court concluded that once the government itself places information in open court files, the press cannot be punished for reporting it.
- Applying this principle, the Court held that because the reporter obtained the victim's name from indictments that were public records available for inspection, the First and Fourteenth Amendments barred Georgia from imposing civil liability for the broadcast.