Word: libelous
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...persuasive not only to the jurors in the Tavoulareas case -- who voted him $2.05 million in damages -- but also to many other Americans. As a matter of law, however, they are wrong. The 1982 verdict against the Post was overturned, first by the trial judge and again on appeal. Libel law is often what scholars call counterintuitive: its tenets sometimes appear to contradict common sense and even common courtesy. The clash between legal principle and public perception may explain why libel verdicts so persistently get reversed and why legal scholars and a growing number of libel plaintiffs are concluding that...
...Amendment but has been clarified over the years by the courts. In the 1964 Supreme Court ! decision in New York Times v. Sullivan, the Justices held that vigorous comment about public officials' performances of their duties was vitally deserving of protection. So it added to the traditional elements of libel -- falsity and damage to reputation -- a third factor involving the journalist's state of mind: "actual malice." In order to prevail in court, public officials would have to show that a reporter knew the story to be false or showed "reckless disregard of whether it was false." That provision turned...
FOOTNOTE: *Ronald Schiavone also is pursuing a libel suit, against TIME (Donovan is not a party) involving an article published in 1982. New Jersey Federal Judge H. Lee Sarokin dismissed the suit last November. A Schiavone appeal of the dismissal is expected to come up for argument in the Third Circuit Court of Appeals this fall...
...prove to be what pollsters call "threshold issues" -- standards to which the candidates must measure up simply to stay in contention. Some candidates will have more difficulty than others. Nevada Republican Paul Laxalt, for instance, was once part of his state's gambling industry and is still pressing a libel suit against a newspaper chain, which, he claims, falsely implied his involvement in casino skimming. Robertson suffers indirectly from the turmoil among fellow televangelists and directly from an accusation that in 1951 he used political influence to evade combat duty in Korea. But for all of the contenders in both...
FOOTNOTE: *The jury in that case found that TIME had erred in its description of a meeting between Sharon and Lebanese leaders prior to the 1982 massacre of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps in Beirut. The description was defamatory, the jury held, but TIME did not libel Sharon because the magazine's statement was published without knowing or reckless falsity...