Article Abstract:
The US Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit has upheld an Arkansas court's award of damages for libel against The Sun, a weekly tabloid that printed a photograph of a 97-year-old woman with a story claiming she was pregnant. The Sun argued that the story was printed as fiction and readers would know it was fiction, so there were no facts to be found libelous. The court disagreed, stating The Sun presents its stories as true and does not state that stories are a mixture of truth and fact, so damages to the woman pictured were appropriate.
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Article Abstract:
The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in Partington v. Bugliosi that the book and movie based on a celebrated murder trial called "And the Sea Will Tell" were works of opinion and not assertions of fact so defamation and false light charges were not supportable. Earle Partington, one of the defense attorneys, charged Vincent Bugliosi, the other defense attorney, with libel by implication in portraying him as incompetent. The Court ruled that the book and movie were opinion and did not address the public figure issues.
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Article Abstract:
The Texas Supreme Court has reversed a lower court and an appeals court's decisions granting an award in a false light invasion of privacy case and remanded the case for retrial. The court stated that the lower courts' use of negligence rather than actual malice as the standard of fault in a false light case was in error, according to the Restatement (Second) of Torts. The case, therefore, had not been adequately argued, the court said, and retrial would permit both parties to clarify their arguments.
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