By Amy Gajda, a former journalist and the Jeffrey D. Forchelli Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School. Among other publications, she is the author of Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy (Viking 2022), a book named by The New York Times as one of the year’s 100 Most Notable. She came to Brooklyn after teaching for more than a decade at Tulane University Law School in New Orleans, and, before that, she held a joint appointment on the journalism and law faculties at the University of Illinois. While there, she won seven Associated Press awards for her legal commentary.
The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled last month that a journalist could not reveal the home address of a state official even though the address was important to a news story and even though the reporter had received the address from the state elections board.
Let that sink in a minute: In mid-June 2025, New Jersey’s high court prevented a journalist from reporting a newsworthy truth that he had learned from the government itself.
If you know this area of law, various Supreme Court decisions likely come to mind. What about Cox Broadcasting? What about Florida Star? What about Bartnicki?
Those three cases — from 1975, 1989 and 2001 — each held that it would be unconstitutional to punish a journalist who had reported a truth that the journalist had acquired legally:
- In Cox Broadcasting v. Cohn, the justices ruled that a newspaper that had reported the name of a rape victim who had died would not be liable despite a state statute making such a revelation illegal. “Once true information is disclosed in public court documents open to public inspection, the press cannot be sanctioned for publishing it,” the court explained.
- In Florida Star v. B.J.F., the justices similarly held that a living rape victim could not successfully bring a statutory claim after a reporter found her name in a police report and published it. “[W]here a newspaper publishes truthful information which it has lawfully obtained, punishment may lawfully be imposed . . . only when narrowly tailored to a state interest of the highest order,” the court wrote, and this interest based on those facts wasn’t it. The court relied on Smith v. Daily Mail Publishing in part, a 1979 case in which the justices found that the Constitution protected journalists for reporting the name of a child involved in a juvenile court proceeding after learning it from the police radio.
- And in Bartnicki v. Vopper, the justices decided that a radio station that had played audio from a private but newsworthy cell phone conversation regarding violence in union negotiations would not be liable despite privacy concerns in the surreptitious taping and its illegality. “In this case,” the court wrote, “privacy concerns give way when balanced against the interest in publishing matters of public importance.”
What those cases and others like them have led some to believe is that, under the First Amendment, any truth can be published as long as it was legally obtained.
That’s why the outcome in New Jersey’s Kratovil v. City of New Brunswick last month may seem surprising. There, the issue was the constitutionality of Daniel’s Law, a New Jersey state statute that restricts the publication of the home addresses and phone numbers of certain people who work in the state’s justice system. New Jersey named its law after Daniel Anderl, the son of U.S. District Court Judge Esther Salas, murdered by a disgruntled lawyer who had searched for and found the Anderl-Salas home address online.
The Kratovil facts seemingly align with the Cox Broadcasting–Florida Star–Bartnicki line of cases at least in some sense: The reporter in Kratovil wanted to publish a story in his own publication, New Brunswick Today, that included a New Brunswick, New Jersey, police official’s precise home address. Information showed that the police official lived 130 miles away in Cape May, too far to effectively discharge his public duties. The reporter had received the address, according to court records, after telling a Board of Elections records custodian (a person who had originally denied the reporter’s request) that the police official “had no reasonable expectation of privacy in his home address under current case law.”
But New Jersey’s high court disagreed with the reporter’s legal interpretation and ruled that, by statute, he couldn’t include the police official’s home address in his story. “Daniel’s Law as written is narrowly tailored to achieve the state interest of the highest order,” the court explained, citing to what’s now known as the Daily Mail line of cases, including Cox Broadcasting, Florida Star and Bartnicki. Here, the highly important state interest was the “protection of certain public officials from harm and the threat of harm so that they can perform their public duties without fear of reprisal.” The police official’s address was “clearly a matter of public concern,” the court wrote, but decided that his privacy interest in that information trumped its news value because people in the justice system are potential targets for violence in 2025. Moreover, Daniel’s Law was appropriately narrowly tailored to survive constitutional scrutiny, the New Jersey court found, because it was “expressly limited to discrete categories of current and former public officials” who were “at particular risk: judges, law enforcement officers, child protective investigators … and prosecutors.”
Given Cox Broadcasting, Florida Star and Bartnicki, the Kratovil outcome might seem to have the press rights-privacy rights constitutional balance incorrect. But, surprisingly, there’s enough wiggle room in the Daily Mail line to support in some ways the New Jersey court’s decision. In short, language that the Supreme Court has used in the past to describe the appropriate press-privacy balance, along with the present danger to individuals should their addresses be published, could potentially support the argument that Daniel’s Law and other statutes like it are constitutional in that sense.
First, Cox Broadcasting, Florida Star, and Bartnicki, along with other Supreme Court decisions like them, are not as broad as they might otherwise appear. Some of them quite literally suggest that the media can indeed be liable for reporting certain truths that place people in harm’s way. In short, despite the First Amendment’s protection for truth, the Supreme Court has suggested that not all truth can be published without punishment.
- In Cox Broadcasting, the 1975 case involving the revelation of a deceased rape victim’s name, the justices, for example, rejected the newspaper’s argument that the press should never be criminally or civilly liable for reporting accurate information. The justices instead wrote that “powerful arguments” could be made that “a zone of privacy surround[s] every individual, a zone within which the State may protect him from intrusion by the press,” and that such privacy traditions, like press freedoms, were “plainly rooted in the traditions and significant concerns of our society.” The justices also limited their holding to the case’s precise facts, deciding only that a statute that restricted the publication of “true information,” “disclosed in public court documents,” and “open to public inspection” would be unconstitutional. In Cox Broadcasting, the reporter had “learned the name of the victim from an examination of indictments,” which he had been handed in court. “No attempt was made by the clerk or anyone else to withhold the name and identity of the victim,” the court explained, and the indictment was a public document.
- In Florida Star, the case involving the revelation of the name of a living rape victim, the court similarly refused to rule broadly, explaining that its decision was limited to the case’s precise facts (that the police themselves had included the information in an incident report purposefully made accessible in the pressroom). “We do not hold that truthful publication is automatically constitutionally protected, or that there is no zone of personal privacy within which the State may protect the individual from intrusion by the press, or even that a State may never punish publication of the name of a victim or a sexual offense,” the justices wrote. Different facts could have supported a different outcome constitutionally: “We accordingly do not rule out the possibility that, in a proper case,” the court wrote, “imposing civil sanctions for publication of the name of a rape victim” might indeed serve to further a state interest of the highest order, including the victim’s safety.
- And in Bartnicki, the 2001 case springing from the broadcast of the surreptitiously recorded cell phone call, the court again reiterated the narrowness of its holding and suggested that sometimes, constitutionally, personal privacy could well win out against press freedoms. “[W]e acknowledge that some intrusions on privacy are more offensive than others,” the court wrote, noting that media could be liable for reporting “disclosures of trade secrets or domestic gossip or other information of purely private concern.” On the Bartnicki facts, the justices emphasized that the journalists in the case had obtained the tapes lawfully from a source, suggesting that the outcome of the case would have been different had they been involved. Two concurring justices separately emphasized that the journalists “neither encouraged nor participated directly or indirectly in the interception” of the recording at issue.
All that is why it’s possible that the Supreme Court could potentially agree at least in some part with the outcome in the New Jersey case of Kratovil v. City of New Brunswick. With regard to the press rights-privacy rights balance, the justices have never sweepingly protected all truthful publication and, instead, have repeated their “narrow” holdings and have suggested repeatedly that sometimes privacy interests will prevail. The initial argument might go like this: Kratovil’s “private” fact, a home address, if indeed it were unknown to most (and many public officials have hired companies to remove such information from the internet and otherwise) was not open for general public inspection as part of a court proceeding or left open by the government in a public place for access by the public; the clerk attempted at first to conceal it from the reporter, until the reporter encouraged its revelation by suggesting that the law was on his side; and its revelation involved important safety considerations for the police official. Regarding the newsworthiness of the underlying story, one argument by the police official might be that, given strong interests in privacy and press freedom both, the precise street address was far less important than the fact that voting records showed that he lived generally in the city of Cape May.
There’s also some support at the Supreme Court for the Kratovil finding that protection of individuals from violence on these facts is a state interest of the highest order. In 2021, the justices decided that public charities could keep names and addresses of donors secret because of the potential for violence in a polarized society and the concern that data breaches might leave such information accessible. “Such risks are heightened in the 21st century and seem to grow with each passing year,” the justices wrote in 2021 in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta, “as anyone with access to a computer [can] compile a wealth of information about anyone else, including such sensitive details as a person’s home address.” It’s true that Bonta was a tax case, but such language suggests that the justices appreciate the dangers of what might otherwise seem to be mundane information. It’s also relevant that the justices have themselves been targets, including Justice Sonia Sotomayor, whom Daniel Anderl’s murderer was said to be tracking, too. In fact, a law similar to Daniel’s Law, which passed as part of the National Defense Authorization Act passed in 2022, prevents data brokers from publishing federal judges’ and Justices’ home addresses, telephone numbers, birthdates, and more.
The interests are real enough so that the Kratovil case does not stand alone in its assessment of the balance between publication rights and the privacy rights within a home address or similar details. On June 27, 2025, for example, New Jersey’s federal trial court allowed 42 lawsuits filed against online data brokers to continue, citing the Kratovil case in part. “Daniel’s Law is designed to protect certain groups of New Jersey,” the federal decision reads, favoring the 19,000 justice system-employed plaintiffs who wanted their names, addresses, and phone numbers removed from online searchable databases. “The information in issue is largely published online,” the court wrote. “Removing it from the internet is therefore crucial to Daniel’s Law’s efficacy.”
Three days after that, on June 30, 2025, a federal court in Washington State hinted that it or another court could one day decide that such removals should apply to all people. There, the plaintiffs based their argument in part on their worry, frustration, and concern that their home addresses and phone numbers were accessible. The federal court allowed their privacy-based misappropriation-of-identity claims against data brokers and people-search databases to continue.
Finally, in mid-July, 2025, a federal court in Florida found that the publication of a celebrity’s phone number would support an invasion-of-privacy claim. “Although Plaintiff is a public figure,” the court wrote, referring to Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary, “his personal contact information is not of legitimate public concern.”
So here’s an analysis of where things stand. First, there is the possibility that the nation’s courts will even more routinely find broader privacy in home addresses and similar details as violence and threats of violence against public officials and others continue. Second, as those courts do that, they could decide against public access to such information and its publication. Legal privacy is built in part on community values and norms, after all. Third, it’s possible that – putting aside other constitutional matters – even the Supreme Court could find a statutory restriction on the publication of home addresses constitutional on the right facts even though such information is known to some. And, fourth, right now, various cases springing from legislation like Daniel’s Law and other laws like it are working their way through the justice system. Those cases, including the recent decisions from New Jersey, Washington State, and Florida, will ultimately help decide the proper legal publication rights-privacy rights balance in contact details.
In June 2025, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that a public official should be able to expect enough privacy in his home address so that a journalist could be punished for publishing it. That’s surprising, but even more surprising is that, one day soon, the justices of the United States Supreme Court could agree.
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