Sarah Palin will get a new trial in her defamation lawsuit against the New York Times and its former opinion editor James Bennet, an appeals court ruled Wednesday, two years after both a judge and a jury ruled that the newspaper did not libel her.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit said the former Alaska governor should have another chance to prove that a 2017 editorial baselessly linking a mass shooting to rhetoric from her political action committee met the high legal standard for defamation.

The case has drawn close attention, with some legal activists seeing in it a potential path to get the Supreme Court to reassess those standards.

Sarah Palin attends the Conservative Political Action Conference in Fort Washington, Md., in March 2023. Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post

But the crux of the appellate court’s decision rests on an unusual move by the judge overseeing the 2022 trial, rather than a larger constitutional question.

While the jury deliberated in February of that year, Judge Jed S. Rakoff told the lawyers involved in the case that he would dismiss it. His intent, he explained, was to ensure that future courts would have both his decision and the jury’s to consider as the case made its way through the inevitable appeals process. He delivered this announcement while the jury was sequestered so it wouldn’t be swayed by his decision.

Yet several jurors later said they received news notifications on their phones alerting them to Rakoff’s ruling.

In its ruling, the appeals court said Rakoff’s decision “improperly intruded on the province of the jury,” which is “sacrosanct in our legal system.” The ruling also said Rakoff improperly excluded evidence, namely other news articles, which Palin believed spoke to the Times’ motivations.

Sonja R. West, a First Amendment scholar at the University of Georgia law school, said she was unsurprised to see the case revived.

“When we later heard stories about jurors getting breaking news alerts about the judge’s decision, I think many of us who were watching the case started to suspect that we might be seeing it again,” she said.

At issue in the case was whether the newspaper acted with “malice” against Palin by publishing the editorial, which described the Palin PAC’s circulation of a flier that included an image of crosshairs trained on Democratic districts as “political incitement” for the 2011 Tucson shooting that killed six people and injured then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

The newspaper argued it was simply a mistake for which it issued a correction within hours. Palin’s lawyers argued the newspaper acted with “actual malice” and was therefore liable for defamation.

When the case first came before Rakoff in 2017, he dismissed it, saying the newspaper had been negligent but not defamatory. But in 2019, an appellate court reinstated the case, prompting media observers and legal scholars to wonder whether the courts’ attitude toward journalistic errors – largely unchallenged since a 1964 Supreme Court ruling set out that public figures suing for libel must show that defendants knew their false statements were false or recklessly disregarded that possibility – were beginning to shift. And Palin and her lawyers have explicitly said they hope to challenge the case that has been a bedrock of libel law in the U.S. for nearly 60 years.

But West sees “good news for press advocates,” in that the logic of Wednesday’s ruling suggests the appellate judges are not inclined to send the case on to the Supreme Court.

The case will be sent back to a lower court for a new trial.

Palin’s legal team applauded the appellate ruling.

“Governor Palin is very happy with today’s decision, which is a significant step forward in the process of holding publishers accountable for content that misleads readers and the public in general,” said attorney Shane Vogt, who also represented professional wrestler Hulk Hogan in his successful invasion-of-privacy suit against Gawker that bankrupted the company. “The truth deserves a level playing field, and Governor Palin looks forward to presenting her case to a jury that is ‘provided with relevant proffered evidence and properly instructed on the law’ as set forth in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals’ opinion.”

New York Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander said “this decision is disappointing” but added that “we’re confident we will prevail in a retrial.”