Opinion ID: 2518909
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: we decline to determine whether the parents' statements are susceptible to defamatory meaning

Text: ¶ 22 The Parents invite us to affirm the district court's grant of summary judgment on the alternative grounds that none of their statements is susceptible to a defamatory interpretation and that, even if a statement might yield a defamatory interpretation, one or more privileges shielded the statement due to the setting in which it was communicated. Because the district court relied on neither of these alternative grounds in reaching its conclusion that the Parents were entitled to summary judgment, Mr. O'Connor urges us to decline this invitation. ¶ 23 Although the district court did not analyze in its memorandum decision whether the statements were susceptible to a defamatory interpretation or whether they were privileged, the court was clearly aware of both questions, noting that they presented key questions of law that must be answered by the [c]ourt before a case may be submitted to the jury. Our authority to affirm a district court's judgment on grounds other than those relied on by that court derives from a long-standing rule. Cox v. Hatch, 761 P.2d 556, 561 (Utah 1988); see also West v. Thomson Newspapers, 872 P.2d 999, 1013 n. 22 (Utah 1994); Higgins v. Salt Lake County, 855 P.2d 231, 241 (Utah 1993); cf. Coulter & Smith, Ltd. v. Russell, 966 P.2d 852, 856 n. 1 (Utah 1998). While we possess the authority to review the matters constituting the alternative grounds for affirmance urged by the Parents, we are not obligated to exercise this authority. In this instance, we decline to take up the merits of the Parents' claim that Mr. O'Connor failed to establish that their comments were subject to defamatory interpretation. This decision is a prudential one. ¶ 24 Inasmuch as we decline to become the first court in the litigation to determine whether the defendants' statements are susceptible to defamatory meaning, we find it prudent to explain how the district court should approach this issue in the event that the question is presented for summary determination after remand. Our past experience reviewing claims of defamatory meaning brought to us on appeal from a grant of summary judgment suggests that we use an analytical approach different from the traditional approach to judging the merits of summary judgment. Although we realize that in general the standard protocols for reviewing summary judgment apply to defamation cases, see West, 872 P.2d at 1003-04, the presence of the First Amendment demands a subtle although significant variation in the treatment of inferences drawn from undisputed facts. An examination of West will illustrate this distinction. ¶ 25 In West, we reversed a court of appeals' determination that three newspaper editorial columns, containing accusations that the mayor of La Verkin, Utah, was, among other things, manipulating the press, were incapable of sustaining a defamatory meaning. Id. at 1000. When it reviewed the district court's grant of summary judgment in favor of the alleged defamers, the court of appeals looked to dictionary definitions of manipulate, located one featuring negative connotations, and ruled that use of the word was therefore susceptible to defamatory interpretation. Id. at 1008. The court of appeals' approach was a wholly defensible application of the summary judgment review principle that a court must construe against the party seeking summary judgment inferences reasonably emanating from the factual record. Manipulate has several decided meanings, at least one of which is unflattering and susceptible to a defamatory interpretation. It is entirely understandable that the court of appeals would conclude that the question of whether the newspapers' accusations constituted defamation should be left to the trier of fact. We nevertheless disagreed. ¶ 26 We said that the court of appeals' approach effectively eviscerate[d] the court's responsibility to determine initially if the statement is defamatory as a matter of law. Id. at 1009 n. 15. Because the existence of defamatory content is a matter of law, a reviewing court can, and must, conduct a context-driven assessment of the alleged defamatory statement and reach an independent conclusion about the statement's susceptibility to a defamatory interpretation. This is not to say that the responsibility of determining whether a statement is defamatory as a matter of law falls to the reviewing court. In the first instance, it does not. Rather, the reviewing court must answer the question of defamatory susceptibility as a matter of law in a nondeferential manner. ¶ 27 This task leaves no room for indulging inferences in favor of the nonmoving party in the district court. It must weigh competing definitions and make sense of context. Admittedly, a court typically avoids these activities when evaluating a motion for summary judgment. Defamation merits a departure from the standard treatment, however, primarily because it never arrives at court without its companion and antagonist, the First Amendment, in tow. See, e.g., Jensen v. Sawyers, 2005 UT 81, ¶ 50, 130 P.3d 325 (Defamation claims always reside in the shadow of the First Amendment. . . . In reaching an accommodation consistent with freedom of speech, defamation has accumulated a considerable assortment of defenses, privileges, heightened burdens of proof, and particularized standards of review.). To accommodate the respect we accord its protections of speech, the First Amendment's presence merits altering our customary rules of review by denying a nonmoving party the benefit of a favorable interpretation of factual inferences. Cf. Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476, 497-98, 77 S.Ct. 1304, 1 L.Ed.2d 1498 (1957) (Harlan, J., dissenting).