Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U.S. 323 (1974), was a landmark decision of the US Supreme Court establishing the standard of First Amendment protection against defamation claims brought by private individuals.

[1] The consequence is that strict liability for defamation is unconstitutional in the United States; the plaintiff must be able to show that the defendant acted negligently or with an even higher level of mens rea.

Gertz filed suit in federal court against Robert Welch, Inc. (the John Birch Society's legal name), claiming its article had defamed and injured his reputation as a lawyer.

However, the magazine's editor admitted in an affidavit filed with the motion that he had made no independent effort to verify the claims in the article and had simply relied on the author's reputation and previous work.

However the defendants filed a "motion for judgment notwithstanding the verdict, or in the alternative for a new trial " which Judge Decker allowed on the grounds that closer reading of the law persuaded him that Times applied insofar as it brought "matters of public interest" into the scope of requiring "actual malice" (knowledge of untruth or reckless disregard for the truth).

[5] The Supreme Court decided the case in a 5-4 majority opinion delivered by Lewis Franklin Powell Jr., with a separate concurrence by Harry Blackmun.

"For these reasons, we conclude that the States should retain substantial latitude in their efforts to enforce a legal remedy for defamatory falsehood injurious to the reputation of a private individual," Powell said.

Blackmun's short concurrence praised his brethren for clarifying an issue he had felt was left undecided in Rosenbloom v. Metromedia, Inc.,[6] one of the earlier defamation cases.

"There are wholly insufficient grounds for scuttling the libel laws of the States in such wholesale fashion, to say nothing of deprecating the reputation interest of ordinary citizens and rendering them powerless to protect themselves...

It took sixteen years, and they were surprised and disappointed by Milkovich v. Lorain Journal Co.,[12] which explicitly rejected the idea, saying that existing protections it had recognized were sufficient to meet the requirements of the First Amendment.