Word: libelous
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...action is similar to that taken by State police last week, when they advised all booksellers that sale of "U.S.A. Confidential" might lead to court action for libel...
Technically, the Commissioner of Public Safety has no legal power to give such "advice." First, any libel action would be civil suit and therefore, unless the state were a plaintiff, outside its jurisdiction. Secondly, if the state did file a bill of equity, the action would have to come through the office of the Attorney General...
Governor Dever has disclaimed any participation in the affair; he has pointed out that the safety commissioner's warning was "just advice" and in no way constituted banning or suppression. Dever may be entirely correct and the commissioner's action may have been a public service; yet the libel laws themselves prevent such "advice" by either the commissioner or the attorney general to be dismissed as suggestions which would have no bearing on any further jurisprudence...
...shoddy case. The authors name some names and print some telephone numbers, but fact after fact hangs on the rawest form of hearsay, and the turn of many a phrase suggests that the co-authors worked with libel lawyers squatting alertly on their laps. Too many of the statements have no substantiation at all. this, for example, is part of the Lait and Mortimer pocket survey of the nation's colleges...
...worse than the coverage of these reporters with their self-styled "Unique will and skill and guts" is the level of their research. Within the sidelines of the libel laws they make about every charge that can be made, always tailoring their material for that crucial, reader-pleasing evidence of Communism, New Dealism, Socialism, "Homosexualism," and the Mafia. They shift into overdrive when it is imposible to check them. One of the passages which will probably titillate historians in years to come is their version of what former New York Mayor William O'Dwyer was doing...