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Time, Inc. v. Hill

United States Supreme Court case

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionApr 27, 2026
Entity authorityQ7804801 ↗
Source-derived summary

Time, Inc. v. Hill, 385 U.S. 374 (1967), is a United States Supreme Court case involving issues of privacy in balance with the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and principles of freedom of speech. The Court held 6–3 that the latter requires that merely negligent intrusions into the former by the media not be civilly actionable. It expanded that principle from its landmark defamation holding in New York Times v. Sullivan.

The Hill family had sued after Life implied in a blurb that the upcoming film adaptation of The Desperate Hours was based on the real-life incident where they were held hostage in their home by escaped convicts. It was accompanied by a photo of the Hills' house in a suburb of Philadelphia, from which they had moved shortly afterwards due to the lingering psychological effects of the episode. In fact, the plot of the novel and a successful play based on it were, while inspired by the Hills' experience, unrelated to it.

Former Vice President Richard M. Nixon argued the Hills' case before the Court.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Time, Inc. v. Hill” is united States Supreme Court case. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Time, Hill and United, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1967—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1967-01-09. For this dossier, Time, Hill and United is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “united States Supreme Court case” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7804801. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1967.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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  2. Expand the search: follow Time, Inc. v. Hill primary sources, Time, Inc. v. Hill archive and Time research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Time, Inc. v. Hill” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.