NationMaster - Encyclopedia: Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc.

Full case name:	Elmer Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc.
Citations:	418 U.S. 323; 94 S. Ct. 2997; 41 L. Ed. 2d 789; 1974 U.S. LEXIS 88; 1 Media L. Rep. 1633
Prior history:	Motion to dismiss denied, 306 F. Supp. 310 (N.D. Ill. 1969); judgment for plaintiff, N.D. Ill.; judgment set aside, judgment for defendant, 322 F. Supp. 997 (N.D. Ill. 1970); affirmed, 471 F.2d 801 (7th Cir. 1972); rehearing denied, 7th Circuit, 9-7-72; certiorari granted, 410 U.S. 925 (1973)
Subsequent history:	Retrial on remand, judgment for plaintiff, N.D. Ill.; affirmed, 680 F.2d 527 (7th Cir. 1982); certiorari denied, 459 U.S. 1226 (1983)

Holding

The First Amendment permits states to formulate their own standards of libel for defamatory statements made about private figures, as long as liability is not imposed without fault. Seventh Circuit reversed.

Court membership

Chief Justice: Warren Burger

Associate Justices: William Douglas, William Brennan, Potter Stewart, Byron White, Thurgood Marshall, Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell, William Rehnquist

Case opinions

Majority by: Powell

Joined by: Stewart, Marshall, Blackmun, Rehnquist

Concurrence by: Blackmun

Dissent by: Burger

Dissent by: Brennan

Dissent by: Douglas

Dissent by: White

Laws applied

U.S. Const. Amend. I, XIV

Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U.S. 323 (1974), is a United States Supreme Court decision which established that opinion is not libel and actual malice is not necessary for defamation of private person if negligence is present. // Case citation is the system used in common law countries such as the United States, England and Wales, Canada, New Zealand Australia and India to uniquely identify the location of past court cases in special series of books called reporters. ... 1974 (MCMLXXIV in Roman) is a common year starting on Tuesday (click on link for calendar). ... The Supreme Court Building, Washington, D.C. The Supreme Court Building, Washington, D.C., (large image) The Supreme Court of the United States, located in Washington, D.C., is the highest court (see supreme court) in the United States; that is, it has ultimate judicial authority within the United States...

The case is also important in that it held that states are free to impose liability for defamatory statements so long as they "do not impose liability without fault." This holding essentially means that strict liability for defamation is unconstitutional in the United States under the First Amendment; the plaintiff must be able to show that the defendant acted negligently or with an even higher level of mens rea. In many other common law countries, strict liability for defamation is still the rule. Strict liability is a legal doctrine in tort law that makes a person responsible for the damages caused by their actions regardless of culpability (fault) or mens rea. ... The mens rea is the Latin term for guilty mind used in the criminal law. ...

1 Background of the case
2 Litigation history
3 The Court's decision
- 3.1 Majority opinion
- 3.2 Dissenting opinions
4 Disposition
5 Subsequent jurisprudence
6 See also
7 Further reading

Background of the case

In 1968 a Chicago police officer named Nuccio shot and killed a young man. After the officer was convicted of second-degree murder, his family retained a local lawyer named Elmer Gertz to represent them in a civil action against the officer. Chicago (officially named the City of Chicago) is the third largest city in the United States (after New York City and Los Angeles), with an official population of 2,896,016, as of the 2000 census. ... Murder is both a legal and a moral term, that are not always coincident. ... Elmer Gertz (September 14, 1906 - April 27, 2000; Chicago, Illinois) was an American lawyer, writer and civil rights activist. ...

A year later, American Opinion, a publication of the John Birch Society, ran a series of articles alleging the existence of a Communist conspiracy to discredit local police agencies and thus facilitate their replacement by a single national force that could be more effectively implement the dictatorship they planned to impose on the country. One of those touched on the Nuccio case, claiming that the officer had been framed at his criminal trial and making strong allegations about Gertz. The John Birch Society (JBS) is an Americanist organization that was founded in 1958 to fight what they saw as the growing threat of Communism and other threats to the constitution of the United States and to promote the free-enterprise system. ... This article is about communism as a form of society and as a political movement. ... Look up Conspiracy in Wiktionary, the free dictionary Conspiracy, as a legal term, is an agreement of two or more people either to commit a crime or to achieve a lawful end by unlawful means: see conspiracy (crime), and conspiracy (civil). ... Dictatorship - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia /**/ @import /skins-1. ...

It claimed that he had orchestrated Nuccio's conviction and that he was a member of various communist front organizations. It further implied that he had a lengthy criminal record himself and used various anti-communist terms of abuse ("Leninist", "Communist-fronter") to describe him. It also included a photograph of Gertz. A front organization, also known as a front group (if it is structured to look like a voluntary association) or a front company or simply a front (if it is structured to look like a company), is any entity set up by and controlled by another organization. ... Look up pejorative on Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

Litigation history

Gertz filed suit in federal court, claiming the article had defamed and injured his reputation as a lawyer. The respondent, the Birch Society's legal name, moved for summary judgement in their favor, arguing that Gertz was a public figure under the recently enunciated Curtis Publishing Co. v. Butts standard, which applied the New York Times Co. v. Sullivan standard to anyone who was sufficiently public, not just government officials. Thus, it was argued, their statements about him were specially privileged and petitioner would have to demonstrate actual malice. However, the magazine's editor admitted in an affidavit filed with the motion that he had made no independent effort to verify the claims in the article and had simply relied on the author's reputation and previous work. The United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois is the Federal district court whose jurisdiction is comprised of the following counties, divided into two divisions: The eastern division: Cook, DuPage, Grundy, Kane, Kendall, La Salle, Lake, and Will counties. ... In English and American law, and systems based on them, libel and slander are two forms of defamation (or defamation of character), which is the tort or delict of making a false statement of fact that injures someones reputation. ... A lawyer is a person licensed by the state to advise clients in legal matters and represent them in courts of law and in other forms of dispute resolution. ... In Common law, a defendant is any person who is required to answer the complaint of a plaintiff in a civil suit or any person who has been named in a criminal information or criminal complaint and stands accused of violating a criminal statute. ... A summary judgment is a legal decision in a case made when one party to a lawsuit requests summary judgment by pre-trial motion. ... Holding The First Amendment, as applied through the Fourteenth, protected a newspaper from being sued for libel in state court for making false defamatory statements about the official conduct of a public official, because the statements were not made with knowing or reckless disregard for the truth. ... The plaintiff, claimant, or complainant is the party initiating a lawsuit, (also known as an action). ... Actual malice in US law is defined as knowledge that the information was false or that it was published with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not. ... An affidavit is a formal sworn statement of fact, written down, signed, and witnessed (as to the veracity of the signature) by a taker of oaths, such as a notary public. ...

The court denied the motion, suggesting that Gertz might only need to prove reckless disregard for the truth. After trial, however, the court determined that he was neither a public figure nor a public official, and instructed the jury to consider only damages. Gertz was awarded $50,000. In legal parlance, a trial is an event in which parties to a dispute present information (in the form of evidence) in a formal setting, usually a court, before a judge, jury, or other designated finder of fact, in order to achieve a resolution to their dispute. ... Jury instructions are the set of legal rules that jurors must follow when the jury is deciding a case. ...

The Birch Society appealed. The Seventh Circuit expressed some misigvings about the trial court's finding that Gertz was not a public figure, but did not overturn. It noted, however, that he had not demonstrated actual malice either, but suggested that since the article concerned a subject of public interest, that standard could be held to apply without regard to the status of the individual or individuals alleging libel. Citing precedent, it said that Gertz also could not prove reckless disregard on the basis of failure to investigate alone, unless he could also prove that the respondents had good cause to believe the article might be false. Yet, it affirmed the trial court's verdict. The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit is a federal court with appellate jurisdiction over the following United States district courts: Central, Northern, and Southern Districts of Illinois Northern and Southern Districts of Indiana Eastern and Western Districts of Wisconsin The court is based at the Dirksen...

The Court's decision

Six separate opinions were filed by a deeply divided court — one for the majority by Justice Powell, with a separate concurrence by Justice Blackmun. All four dissenting justices filed their own opinions. Official portrait of Justice Powell, 1976. ... Concurrence or Simultaneity is a legal term, from Western jurisprudence, referring to the simultaneous occurrence of actus reus (bad action) and mens rea (bad mind), which must be present for a crime to have occurred; except in crimes of strict liability. ... Justice Harry Blackmun Harry Andrew Blackmun (November 12, 1908 â€“ March 4, 1999) was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1970 to 1994. ...

Majority opinion

After reviewing the case history and prior decisions, Powell began with a reminder that "Under the First Amendment there is no such thing as a false idea ... (it) requires that we protect some falsehood in order to protect speech that matters." The first ten Amendments to the U.S. Constitution make up the Bill of Rights. ...

However, he rejected the idea that the mere public interest of the subject should outweigh any consideration of Gertz's status as a private or public figure. The latter, he noted, have access to more ways of counteracting allegations about them than private figures do, and thus they deserved a lower standard to prove libel. He also highly doubted that one could involuntarily become a public figure.

Gertz "had achieved no general fame or notoriety in the community," despite some public service in his past, and therefore did not meet the Sullivan or Curtis tests. "He plainly did not thrust himself into the vortex of this public issue, nor did he engage the public's attention in an attempt to influence its outcome."

"For these reasons, we conclude that the States should retain substantial latitude in their efforts to enforce a legal remedy for defamatory falsehood injurious to the reputation of a private individual," Powell said.

However, in the one aspect of the decision that was favorable to the appellees, the Court also ruled that states could not impose a strict liability standard for defamation (i.e., plaintiffs had to be able to show fault of some kind) and that juries could not be allowed to award punitive damages, such as the $50,000 Gertz had received, absent any showing of actual injury, since juries could use that power to punish unpopular opinions. A new trial was ordered. An appellee, or respondent, is the party to an appeal of a lower court judgment its favor. ... Strict liability is a legal doctrine in tort law that makes a person responsible for the damages caused by their actions regardless of culpability (fault) or mens rea. ...

Blackmun's short concurrence praised his brethren for clarifying an issue he had felt was left undecided in Rosenbloom v. Metromedia Inc., one of the earlier defamation cases. He also scoffed at fears expressed by dissenters that the press was now too unconstrained: "What the Court has done, I believe, will have little, if any, practical effect on the functioning of responsible journalism."

Dissenting opinions

The minority chose a variety of grounds for its disagreement. In the longest, Byron White accused his colleagues of overreaching, a common theme of his dissents. "The Court, in a few printed pages, has federalized major aspects of libel law by declaring unconstitutional in important respects the prevailing defamation law in all or most of the 50 States," he said. "There are wholly insufficient grounds for scuttling the libel laws of the States in such wholesale fashion, to say nothing of deprecating the reputation interest of ordinary citizens and rendering them powerless to protect themselves ... It is an ill-considered exercise of the power entrusted to this Court." Justice White can refer to: Edward Douglass White, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court Byron Raymond White, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court This is a disambiguation page â€” a list of pages that otherwise might share the same title. ...

Justice Douglas, on the other hand, felt that libel laws were too strict even as it was, and that leaving liability standards for private figures up to the states was too capricious: Douglas William Orville Douglas (October 16, 1898 - January 19, 1980) was a United States Supreme Court Associate Justice. ...

This of course leaves the simple negligence standard as an option, with the jury free to impose damages upon a finding that the publisher failed to act as "a reasonable man." With such continued erosion of First Amendment protection, I fear that it may well be the reasonable man who refrains from speaking.

Justice Brennan joined him in fearing that the press in some states could be too easily restricted and practice self-censorship in reporting on public affairs as a result. Chief Justice Burger's short dissent worried that the decision might make it less likely that lawyers would be willing to take the cases of unpopular clients. William Joseph Brennan (April 25, 1906 - July 24, 1997) was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. ... Self-censorship is the act of censoring and/or classifying ones own book(s), film(s), or other kind of art to avoid offending others without an authority pressuring them to do so. ... Warren Burger at a press conference in May 1969 shortly after he was nominated to be Chief Justice of the United States. ...

Disposition

Gertz won the retrial, and the verdict was sustained on appeal. The case finally ended when the Court denied the Birch Society certiorari in 1983. He died in 2000. This law-related article does not cite its references or sources. ...

Subsequent jurisprudence

Since the majority opinion emphatically stated that there was "no such thing as a false idea," observers and libel law experts expected the court to define an opinion privilege against libel the next time an appropriate case came up. It took sixteen years, and they were surprised and disappointed by Milkovich v. Lorain Journal Co., which explicitly rejected the idea, saying that existing protections it had recognized were sufficient to meet the requirements of the First Amendment. Only in New York, where state courts have ruled all statements of opinion are protected, as long as they do not allege illegal conduct, does the privilege exist. Holding The First Amendment does not require a separate opinion privilege limiting the application of state defamation laws. ...

There have been no major libel rulings since then.

Contents

Background of the case GA_googleFillSlot("encyclopedia_square");