Jackson sketches out her views on the First Amendment and press freedom.

Within the first set of questions Wednesday morning, Senator Jon Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia, requested Decide Ketanji Brown Jackson to evaluation a few of the Supreme Courtroom’s best hits amongst its First Modification precedents. She gave crisp accounts of rulings on incitement, prior restraints and libel.

There was a subtext to the questions. Two members of the Supreme Courtroom — Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch — have referred to as for reconsideration of the foundational 1964 libel choice, New York Instances v. Sullivan, which made it fairly arduous for public officers to sue information organizations and others for libel.

“What began in 1964 with a choice to tolerate the occasional falsehood to make sure strong reporting by a comparative handful of print and broadcast shops,” Justice Gorsuch wrote in a dissenting opinion final yr, “has developed into an ironclad subsidy for the publication of falsehoods by means and on a scale beforehand unimaginable.”

Justice Clarence Thomas, for his half, has repeatedly referred to as for the Supreme Courtroom to rethink Sullivan and rulings extending it, saying they had been “policy-driven selections masquerading as constitutional legislation.”

These statements in some methods echoed President Donald J. Trump’s frustration with trendy defamation legislation.

“We’re going to open up these libel legal guidelines,” Mr. Trump stated on the marketing campaign path in 2016. “So when The New York Instances writes successful piece which is a complete shame or when The Washington Submit, which is there for different causes, writes successful piece, we are able to sue them and win cash as an alternative of getting no probability of successful as a result of they’re completely protected.”

Decide Jackson didn’t handle these critiques. However in saying press freedoms “undergird our democracy,” she indicated that she was not more likely to take part them.