[JURIST] Judge Timothy Black of the US District Court for the Southern District of Ohio [official website] on Thursday struck down a contested law in Ohio, known as the false statements law [text], which barred people from knowingly or recklessly making false statements about candidates in the course of a campaign or nomination for an election to public office. Black prioritized the benefits of free speech and First Amendment [text] rights in Thursday’s ruling, which declared the Ohio law unconstitutional. Black stated the proper way to manage false statements in election politics [AP report] is “not to force silence, but to encourage truthful speech in response, and to let the voters, not the government, decide what the political truth is.”

The dispute surrounding Ohio’s false statement law began four years ago, when then US Representative Steve Driehaus filed a complaint with the Ohio Elections Commission over billboards put up by the Susan B. Anthony List (SBA) [advocacy website] in his congressional district, which accused Driehaus of supporting taxpayer funded abortion by virtue of his support for the Affordable Care Act. After Driehaus lost his re-election bid, his complaint was dismissed. However, the SBA had already filed a suit in federal district court challenging the constitutionality of the Ohio law. The district court held that the suit was non-justiciable, and the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit agreed. The US Supreme Court [official website] granted certiorari in the case of Susan B. Anthony List v. Driehaus [SCOTUS case page] in January 2014 and the Court heard oral arguments [JURIST report] in April. In June Justice Clarence Thomas reversed [JURIST report; opinion, PDF] the decision of the lower court and remanded the case to the US District Court for the Southern District of Ohio to determine standing and the constitutionality of the law.