New York Times Co. v. United States

New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971) was a United States Supreme Court decision. The ruling made it possible for the New York Times and Washington Post newspapers to publish the then-classified Pentagon Papers without risk of government censure.

In the midst of the Watergate scandal, the Times case featured a constitutional crisis in which the executive authority of the U.S. President, had forced the prominent newspaper to suspend publication of classified information in its possession — subordinating the constitutional freedom of the press under the First Amendment to claimed executive need to maintain the secrecy of the information.