Adam Liptak

A closely divided Supreme Court struggled to decide whether internet retailers should have to collect sales taxes in states where they have no physical presence. Brick-and-mortar businesses have long complained that they are disadvantaged by having to charge sales taxes while many of their online competitors do not. States have said that they are missing out on tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue under a 1992 Supreme Court ruling that helped spur the rise of internet shopping.

The Supreme Court announced that it would not decide whether federal prosecutors can force Microsoft to turn over digital data stored outside the United States. The move followed arguments in the case in February and the enactment of a new federal law that both sides said made the case moot.

When Donald J. Trump was running for president, he promised to “open up our libel laws.” No one quite knew what he meant. Recently President Trump started to make good on his campaign pledge. But he did so inadvertently — as a libel defendant on the losing side of a decision that will help victims of sexual misconduct sue when they are called liars. These days, a remarkable number of libel suits, including ones against Bill Cosby, Bill O’Reilly, Roy S.

Can the president change libel laws? No. Libel law is a state-law tort, meaning that state courts and state legislatures have defined its contours. Since the Supreme Court’s 1964 decision in New York Times v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court has placed constitutional limits on how states can define libel, notably by requiring public officials and, later, public figures to prove actual malice. That protection was needed, Justice William J. Brennan Jr. wrote, to vindicate a “profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide-open.” Such debate, Justice Brennan wrote, “may well include vehement, caustic and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.” Changing New York Times v. Sullivan would require either the Supreme Court to overrule it or a constitutional amendment. Neither is remotely likely, though President Trump could try to appoint Supreme Court justices who would vote to overturn the precedent.

“It has been held impermissible,” Federal Judge J. Paul Oetken wrote, “to exclude a single television news network from live coverage of mayoral candidates’ headquarters and to withhold White House press passes in a content-based or arbitrary fashion.”

Feb 24’s developments at the White House crossed that legal line, said Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “That was unconstitutional,” he said. “If you exclude reporters from briefings that they otherwise have a right to attend because you don’t like their reporting, then you have engaged in viewpoint discrimination.” Viewpoint discrimination by the government in a public forum is almost always unconstitutional. Public officials are not required to give reporters perfectly equal access, of course, and exclusive interviews and selective leaks are commonplace and lawful. But First Amendment experts said the allocation of government resources like press passes and access to public forums like news conferences must be based on neutral criteria rather than discrimination based on what the journalists had written.

A ruling issued on Feb 27 by a federal judge in Manhattan, in a case brought by a freelance journalist without a lawyer, may interest the White House. The judge said that the New York Police Department may have violated the First Amendment by revoking the press credentials of the journalist, Jason B. Nicholas. The ruling was preliminary, and the Police Department said it had legitimate reasons for its actions. But Judge J. Paul Oetken’s decision was timely, following as it did the exclusion of several news organizations from a Feb 24 meeting.. “It has been held impermissible,” Judge Oetken wrote, “to exclude a single television news network from live coverage of mayoral candidates’ headquarters and to withhold White House press passes in a content-based or arbitrary fashion.”

Feb 24’s developments at the White House crossed that legal line, said Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “That was unconstitutional,” he said. “If you exclude reporters from briefings that they otherwise have a right to attend because you don’t like their reporting, then you have engaged in viewpoint discrimination.” Viewpoint discrimination by the government in a public forum is almost always unconstitutional.

A Supreme Court argument about whether North Carolina may bar registered sex offenders from using Facebook, Twitter and similar services turned into a discussion of how thoroughly social media have transformed American civic discourse.

The justices’ remarks, which indicated easy familiarity with the major social media services, suggested that they would strike down the North Carolina law under the First Amendment. Justice Elena Kagan said that President Trump, every governor and every member of Congress has a Twitter account. “So this has become a crucially important channel of political communication,” she said. “And a person couldn’t go onto those sites and find out what these members of our government are thinking or saying or doing.”

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said that social media sites had become, and in some ways had surpassed, the public square as a place for discussion and debate. “The sites that Justice Kagan has described and their utility and the extent of their coverage are greater than the communication you could have ever had, even in the paradigm of public square,” Justice Kennedy said.

The North Carolina law has economic consequences, too, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said. “Take something like LinkedIn, which many, many people in our society today are looking for jobs there, but high school students are permitted to look for jobs and to post their personal data on that site,” she said.

Alarmed by Donald Trump’s record of filing lawsuits to punish and silence his critics, a committee of media lawyers at the American Bar Association commissioned a report on Trump’s litigation history. The report concluded that Trump was a “libel bully” who had filed many meritless suits attacking his opponents and had never won in court. But the bar association refused to publish the report, citing “the risk of the ABA being sued by Mr. Trump.” David J. Bodney, a former chairman of the media-law committee, said he was baffled by the bar association’s interference in the committee’s journal.

“It is more than a little ironic,” he said, “that a publication dedicated to the exploration of First Amendment issues is subjected to censorship when it seeks to publish an article about threats to free speech.” In internal communications, the bar association’s leadership, including its general counsel’s office and public relations staff, did not appear to dispute the report’s conclusions. But James Dimos, the association’s deputy executive director, objected to the term “libel bully” and other sharp language in the report, saying in an Oct. 19 email that the changes were needed to address “the legitimately held views of ABA staff who are charged with managing the reputational and financial risk to the association.”

In a decision with far-reaching implications for the television industry, the Supreme Court ruled that Aereo, a start-up streaming service, had violated copyright laws by capturing broadcast signals on miniature antennas and delivering them to subscribers for a fee.

The 6-3 decision was a victory for the major television networks, which had argued that Aereo’s business model amounted to a theft of their programming. The judges’ ruling leaves the current broadcast model intact while imperiling Aereo’s viability as a business after just over two years in existence.

In arguments before the court in April, the broadcasters contended that Aereo and similar services threatened to cut into a vital revenue stream -- the billions of dollars they receive from cable and satellite companies in retransmission fees, the money paid to networks and local stations for the right to retransmit their programming. The networks said this revenue was so essential that they would have considered removing their signals from the airwaves had the court ruled for Aereo.

The start-up contended that the service it provided through warehouses of small antennas was merely helping its subscribers do what they could lawfully do since the era of rabbit-ears: watch free broadcast television delivered over public airwaves. Both Barry Diller, who heads Aereo owner IAC/InterActiveCorp, and Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia have expressed doubt about whether Aereo could remain in business if the Supreme Court ruled against it.

The Supreme Court has turned down an appeal from James Risen, a reporter for The New York Times facing jail for refusing to identify a confidential source.

The court’s one-line order gave no reasons but effectively sided with the government in a confrontation between what prosecutors said was an imperative to secure evidence in a national security prosecution and what journalists said was an intolerable infringement of press freedom.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond (VA), ordered Risen to comply with the subpoena. Risen has said he will refuse. “I will continue to fight,” Risen said.

His lawyer, Joel Kurtzberg, urged the Justice Department to hold its fire. “The ball is now in the government’s court,” Kurtzberg wrote. “The government can choose not to pursue Mr. Risen’s testimony if it wants to. We can only hope now that the government will not seek to have him held in contempt for doing nothing more than reporting the news and keeping his promises” to his sources.