Trump called for scrapping laws that offer the news media broad protection from libel suits — “We’re going to have people sue you like you’ve never got sued before,” he said in 2016 as he was running for president — many journalists and the lawyers who defend them brushed it off as an empty threat.

But a libel case that begins Monday in federal court in Lower Manhattan, Sarah Palin v.

It alleges that The Times defamed her with an editorial that incorrectly asserted a link between her political rhetoric and a mass shooting near Tucson, Ariz., in 2011 that left six people dead and 14 wounded, including Gabrielle Giffords, then a Democratic member of Congress.

In correcting the editorial, The Times said it had “incorrectly stated that a link existed between political rhetoric and the 2011 shooting.”.

Those who argue that media outlets should pay a steeper legal price when they get something wrong or make a mistake are more emboldened now than at any point since the landmark 1964 Supreme Court decision in The New York Times Company v.

The Palin case, being tried in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, won’t directly deal with larger constitutional issues.

Most libel suits against The Times are dismissed before they ever reach a jury, making this case particularly uncommon.

“The case will come down to whether the jury — as juries sometimes do — will decide based on their likes and impressions of the parties,” said George Freeman, executive director of the Media Law Resource Center and a former lawyer for The Times, “or whether they will actually follow the actual malice rules the judge will give them.”.

At the same time, some Republicans are using defamation allegations against journalists with an aggressiveness that media advocates say is without precedent — from the Trump campaign’s since-dismissed suit against The Times in 2020 for a critical opinion piece to former Representative Devin Nunes’s ongoing case against a reporter now working for Politico who posted to Twitter an article that Mr.

The heart of The Times’s defense in the Palin case is that the error in the editorial was not a case of actual malice but a mistake made under a tight and routine production deadline that was corrected after it was pointed out.

Palin argues were defamatory were introduced during the editing process by James Bennet, who was then the editorial page editor for The Times.

The Times has not lost a libel case on American soil — where laws provide much more robust press protections than in other countries — in 50 years.

“We worry a lot about the risk that public officials and other powerful figures can use threats of defamation suits to deter news gathering and suppress important conversations on matters of public concern,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a law professor at the University of Utah who has documented the judiciary’s increasingly dim view of the media.

And she said she is looking at the Palin case as a test of how harshly a jury — in today’s tribal political climate — will judge media companies for their mistakes.

Palin during the appeal but is no longer involved in the case, has argued on behalf of several high-profile clients in defamation suits against major media outlets and been at the forefront of the conservative effort to make the rethinking of libel laws more mainstream.

Locke said in an interview that while the Sullivan precedent is not worth scrapping entirely, it fails in today’s media culture.