Court Opinion

ID: 9481794
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 08:31:42.486257+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:48:34.499873
License: Public Domain

CUDAHY, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
It is, to say the least, disheartening — and perhaps even productive of a depressive neurosis — to see the scholarly efforts of a district court judge to make sense of Indiana libel law set at naught. I agree with Judge McKinney that “[tjhere is no precedential or jurisprudential reason to allow a libel plaintiff to call witnesses to specially prove his business losses, but to disallow expert and other testimony to prove his psychological injuries.” Dist. Ct.Op. at 13.
The majority seems to be mired in the jurisdictional conflicts between the ecclesiastical and the common law courts of the sixteenth century. The ecclesiastical courts regarded defamation as a sin and punished it with a penance. For a considerable period of time, therefore, the common law courts held that, unless “temporal” damage could be proved, defamation was a “spiritual” matter to be left to the Church. See Prosser, The Law of Torts 772; see also Veeder, The History and Theory of the Law of Defamation, 3 Co-lum.L.Rev. 546 (1903). Perhaps the majority, too, views a psychological diagnosis as in the “spiritual” realm and thus beyond our competence.
In fact, psychologists may not have really added much to what in another day would have been perceived as a problem of the spirit, best left to ecclesiastical attention. But, given modern postulates and perspectives, I see no reason to equate what purports to be a scientific diagnosis threatening adverse economic consequences (through lowered job performance) with a mere presumption of mental anguish and emotional distress. This is the equation, however, that the majority makes. Despite the scientific trappings of expert testimony, the majority is unwilling to factor these matters of the “spirit” into its calculations.
Indiana law is at least ambiguous and, to invoke another psychiatric diagnosis, schiz*1208ophrenic on this subject. The majority signally fails to explain away the statement in Judge Faulconer’s concurrence in Gibson v. Kincaid, 140 Ind.App. 186, 221 N.E.2d 834, 846 (1967), that “special damages means that the loss sustained by the plaintiff must be a particular loss, supported by specific evidence.” The majority merely relies on a later statement in Gibson suggesting the inadequacy of general allegations of mental anguish and the like. The majority’s effort to distinguish Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union v. Zurzolo, 142 Ind.App. 242, 233 N.E.2d 784 (1968), is similarly strained. The district court has, therefore, found more than adequate support in Indiana law for the result it has sought to reach.
By seeking to interpret Indiana law as congruent with modern concepts of psychology as a science, the district court has hit upon a perfectly acceptable basis for abandoning jurisdictional distinctions of the sixteenth century that have, as far as I can see, no current utility. The majority, on the other hand, adopts a view which might regard proof even of irreversible psychosis as a mere restatement of mental anguish and emotional distress. For a psychosis, too, is a thing of the spirit (albeit an evil one).
I therefore respectfully dissent.