New York Times Co. v. United States

The war in Vietnam was causing significant uprising in the United States, and a political scientist working at the Pentagon took action. He smuggled a paper from the Pentagon called the "Pentagon Papers," that detailed the decision-making process of the U.S. in Vietnam, and gave it to the New York Times to publish. The New York Times began publishing this paper on June 13, 1971, and was ordered to stop by the federal government on June 30, 1971. The case was appealed very quickly and was a question of First and Fourteenth Amendment rights to freedom of the press and freedom of speech. The Court ruled in favor of the New York Times with a 6-3 vote, yet all of the justices wrote their own opinions. The majority opinion was that there was nothing in the Constitution that outlawed publishing certain types of material.

I do not side with the Court in this case because there should be some bans on freedom of speech and freedom of the press if the state of the country and foreign policy are in jeopardy, such as what happened with the public release of the Pentagon Papers. 

Here is a preview of a PBS documentary on Daniel Ellsberg and what he did to obtain the Pentagon Papers, his motives behind his actions, and the full story behind the Supreme Court case. 

The per curiam decision made in the Times case was that "any system of prior restraints of expression comes to this Court bearing a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity." In simple terms, the Court saw that the New York Times could publish things like this, even though they might cause issues and uprising.