Opinion ID: 1758546
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Minnesota Case Law

Text: Until now, our court has directly addressed the fair and accurate reporting privilege only in the context of judicial proceedings and has never stated whether it was an absolute or a qualified privilege. Almost a century ago, we held that the fair and accurate report of a judicial proceeding was privileged, as long as the matter reported fell within the control of the proceeding. See Nixon v. Dispatch Printing Co., 101 Minn. 309, 311, 112 N.W. 258, 258 (1907). In Nixon, we addressed whether statements taken from a complaint filed in district court for a divorce proceeding and published in the local newspaper were privileged. See id. The Nixon court stated that [t]he law is well settled that a publication of judicial proceedings, if fair and impartial, is privileged. Id. But the court then concluded that the pleadings in that case had not yet been presented to the district court for action so they were not yet part of a judicial proceeding and therefore their publication was not privileged. See id. at 313, 112 N.W. at 259. Nixon's holding that pleadings not yet accepted by a court are outside the scope of the fair and accurate reporting privilege was incorporated into comment e of Restatement (Second) of Torts § 611 and has been recognized by commentators as defining one of the limits of the privilege. See Restatement (Second) of Torts § 611, cmt. e; see also Prosser and Keeton on Torts § 115, at 837 n. 51. In Nixon, we did not state whether a showing of common law malice would defeat the fair and accurate reporting privilege, nor did we directly address whether the privilege was an absolute or a qualified privilege. Consequently, while adopting the fair and accurate reporting privilege in the context of a judicial proceeding, our discussion of the privilege in Nixon provides little guidance on whether it is an absolute or qualified privilege and whether a showing of common law malice would defeat the privilege once it has been determined to be applicable. Nixon was also decided nearly 60 years before the Supreme Court articulated the First Amendment implications of defamation sanctions in Sullivan.