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Ms. Palin’s lawyers may get another chance to argue why those protections should be pared back on appeal. Legal experts said that one avenue for asking an appeals court to reconsider the case is to ask that the courts revisit the broad manner in which the law defines a public figure.

Ms. Palin’s suit claimed that The Times defamed her with an editorial that incorrectly asserted a link between her political rhetoric and a mass shooting near Tucson, Ariz., in 2011 that left six people dead and 14 wounded, including Gabrielle Giffords, then a Democratic member of Congress. Ms. Giffords’s district had been one of 20 singled out on a map circulated by Ms. Palin’s political action committee underneath digitized cross hairs. There was no evidence the shooter had seen or was motivated by the map.

The editorial was published on June 14, 2017, the same day that a gunman opened fire at a baseball field in Virginia where Republican congressmen were practicing, injuring several people, including Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana. The headline was “America’s Lethal Politics,” and the editorial asked whether the Virginia shooting was evidence of how vicious American politics had become. The Times corrected the editorial the morning after it was published after readers pointed out the mistake.

On the witness stand, the former Times editor who inserted the erroneous wording into the article, James Bennet, testified that the incident left him racked with guilt and that he had thought about it almost every day since. “It was just a terrible mistake,” he said.

Ms. Palin and her lawyers attempted to convince the jury that Mr. Bennet had acted out of animus toward her and, regardless of any contrition he later showed, was reckless in rushing to judgment about her.