Word: hutchinsons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...case, Senator William Proxmire ridiculed a scientist, Ronald Hutchinson, claiming that he had wasted taxpayers' dollars with his publicly funded research. Hutchinson had received more than $500,000 to study aggression in monkeys in order to help the Navy and NASA better select crewmen for submarines and spacecraft. Calling the project "monkey business," Proxmire announced in news releases and newsletters that he had honored it with one of his monthly "Golden Fleece Awards." Hutchinson sued him for $8 million in damages for libel. Another case involved a man named Ilya Wolston, a former State Department interpreter, who had been...
...Both Hutchinson and Wolston were declared to be public figures by lower courts, and both libel suits were summarily dismissed. But the high court reversed those decisions. Neither man had "thrust" himself into a public controversy in order to affect its outcome, ruled the court...
...footnote in the Hutchinson decision also cautioned judges against automatically throwing out libel cases brought by clear-cut public figures. The defendant's state of mind-the key element in actual malice-"does not readily lend itself to summary disposition," wrote Chief Justice Warren Burger. Just two months ago, the high court ruled in Herbert vs. Lando that libel plaintiffs can probe a reporter's state of mind. This may raise questions of fact that only a jury, not a judge, can decide...
Burger's sleuthing struck some court watchers as consistent with his deep concern about press coverage of the court. "He intensely dislikes the press," says Georgetown University Law Professor Dennis Hutchinson, a former Supreme Court law clerk. "He is convinced that the way he runs things is right, but when put in a critical light it unnerves him." ABC's O'Brien, 35, a lawyer who worked as a television reporter in New Orleans before joining the network two years ago, may have scored an unmistakable coup in revealing the two decisions, but some journalists wondered whether...
William L. Hutchinson Dallas...