Court Opinion

ID: 9425819
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:15:53.980071+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:57.736509
License: Public Domain

Mr. Chief Justice Burger,
dissenting.
The doctrines of the law of defamation have had a gradual evolution primarily in the state courts. In New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U. S. 254 (1964), and its progeny this Court entered this field.
Agreement or disagreement with the law as it has evolved to this time does not alter the fact that it has been orderly development with a consistent basic rationale. In today’s opinion the Court abandons the tradi*355tional thread so far as the ordinary private citizen is concerned and introduces the concept that the media will be liable for negligence in publishing defamatory statements with respect to such persons. Although I agree with much of what Mr. Justice White states, I do not read the Court’s new doctrinal approach in quite the way he does. I am frank to say I do not know the parameters of a “negligence” doctrine as applied to the news media. Conceivably this new doctrine could inhibit some editors, as the dissents of Mr. Justice Douglas and Mr. Justice Brennan suggest. But I would prefer to allow this area of law to continue to evolve as it has up to now with respect to private citizens rather than embark on a new doctrinal theory which has no jurisprudential ancestry.
The petitioner here was performing a professional representative role as an advocate in the highest tradition of the law, and under that tradition the advocate is not to be invidiously identified with his client. The important public policy which underlies this tradition — the right to counsel — would be gravely jeopardized if every lawyer who takes an “unpopular” case, civil or criminal, would automatically become fair game for irresponsible reporters and editors who might, for example, describe the lawyer as a “mob mouthpiece” for representing a client with a serious prior criminal record, or as an “ambulance chaser” for representing a claimant in a personal injury action.
I would reverse the judgment of the Court of Appeals and remand for reinstatement of the verdict of the jury and the entry of an appropriate judgment on that verdict.